Occupation
by Neftzer
Summary: Wielder Elizabeth Bronte finds herself in Paris for New Years Eve 1941. Working under deep cover for MI6, she finds herself beseiged by vivid memories or future visions that are not hers--or are they? Will they lead her to do something she will regret?
1. What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

_Witchblade_, pre-series.   
*Rated "pW" for Previous Wielder. Deals with past lives. Based largely on conjecture and historical fact. 

_**Occupation**_

**December 31, 1941 - _New Year's Eve_, Paris, France** - Elizabeth Bronte needed a cigarette. And not one of those nasty Deutsch _zigaretten_ Rolf brandished about, offering them as favors as though they were the most valuable candy sticks known to the Fatherland. No, what she needed was a good, old-fashioned Lucky Strike, packed tightly with American-raised tobacco, and the taste of rolling paper that said home and mother and apple pie and baseball. _That's_ what she needed. 

And of course that was the last thing in Paris she was likely to get. She glanced to her side, to Rolf's profile, lit in the movie screen's glow. His nose, never broken, unlike so many of the boys' had been back home. His cheekbone, high and slanted, and so envied by the other ladies attending the theatre party that night. His jaw line, straight and proud and cutting as it formed his chin. That tiny spot just to the underside where he never got close enough with his razor, invisible to the rest of the world, but so familiar to her. _Rolf_. He could give her caviar, and opulence, rubies and rare wine by the bathtub-full, but this desire for a smoke--_this_, something even the poorest American could bum off a neighbor, _this_, even if she had the cunning to somehow ask for it, _this_, he could not give her. 

She was, after all, no longer an American. In fact, as far as Rolf knew, she had never been a Yank, and certainly had never seen the Yankees play. No, to him she was Elizabeth Heiden, a good child of the Fatherland, gulled at a young age into a marriage with one of her father's business partners, Jack Bronte, a Briton, who had widowed her young--and how fortunate, that--so that she could return from her husband's country, and mourn her poor choice, reborn in the arms of the new-christened Third Reich. And in the arms of her SS lover, _Leutnant_ Rolf Germer. 

Onscreen, Frank Albertson lit another _beautiful_ cigarette--he was going through them like Rolf's friends went through champagne: quickly, indiscriminately, and in their haste to consume, without an ounce of understanding that they were rapidly drinking Paris dry of the tempting spoils it had to offer. 

Elizabeth attempted to direct her scattered attention back to the film playing. Ginger Rogers and David Niven left their posh New Year's party before the clock struck twelve, and for a moment Bronte let their voices--Rogers' Missouri tones in particular--fill her head, as the American soundtrack ran barely muted under the somewhat delayed German dubbing, as though the German voices were waiting to hear what was said before doubling it. 

The result sounded similar to an echo, and the thick, somewhat hard syllables of the tongue of the Fatherland imposed over the light, carefree and playful lilt of Rogers' canny accent squeezed Elizabeth's heart for an instant like a clammy fist. _Was this moment prophetic_? Is this how it would end? The good old U.S. of A. drowned in a mirthless chorus of Deutsch? Was it only, as most Nazis saw, a matter of time before Hitler consumed what was left of broken England and crossed the Atlantic to subdue the States? Boston? Philadelphia? _Oh, God_, she almost cried out, _Brooklyn_? 

After all, would she herself have believed two years ago--when she first saw this picture back home--that the next time she saw it she would be sitting in a converted theatre in Paris? _Occupied_ Paris, herself surrounded by Nazis? 

She couldn't think about it. She wouldn't think about it. Her head was pounding. Her hands shook. An involuntary shiver shot up her spine. Fortunately, Rolf was oblivious, utterly engaged in the film's shallow plot of a foundling, an unlikely mother, and a decadent playboy. 

Ginger Rogers stepped into the crowd at Times Square, her gown elegant, her hair and makeup exquisite, and David Niven attempted to order them both hot dogs. Then, during a raucous chorus of _Happy Days Are Here Again_, the lovers were separated, awash in a flood of people and mirth as the clock struck twelve. _Not just people, though_, Bronte could not keep herself from thinking, _New Yorkers_. 

To keep any stray look that might catch the wrong person's attention well at bay, Elizabeth bent her neck and studied her hands in her lap for a moment. She fiddled with the bracelet on her wrist and moved her fingers to her pulse, deliberately counting the beats in an effort to calm her fluttering heart. What was wrong with her, after all? Tonight was no different than any other. 

_An Asian man stood in front of her, his hair long, his clothes a style unfamiliar to her. His face was at once sad and angry. "I don't know who I am anymore," she said. She could taste something bitter in her mouth, like fear, and could feel the weight of cold metal in her palm._

She felt, as always, as though she had jolted out of the portent with all the grace of a child waking from a nightmare, and counseled herself, as always, that she had not given herself away. For all that such moments felt as though she had been sucked down a drain and spit out, those around her rarely--if ever--seemed to notice, as though the time it took her to experience the visions was inequal to the time the visions actually spanned. 

Elizabeth Bronte had had enough for one evening. She excused herself to the washroom, leaning over to tell Rolf quietly, so as not to disturb the rest of the crowd. If she could not have the cigarette she craved, at least she could catch a breath of fresh air, and attempt to get her head on straight. 

. 

_...to be continued... _

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. 

Writing a WWII-era fiction is no easy task. I love receiving feedback, but if your comments are more critical, or "so-and-so would _never_ have done this in 1942," or, "buildings in Paris at this time were made largely from marble, and not brick," I must ask you to restrain yourself from sending them on to me. I've done the homework, and am ready to write the story. Any mistakes of time and place must be chalked up to deliberate anachronism on the part of Neftzer. _Thanks for understanding._ Also? Yes, I know that Gabriel gives two seperate ranks for the SS officer Rolf Germer, both Lieutenant, and Colonel, ergo contradicting himself (though it is unclear as to which time). Let it go. ;) I almost have...Here's an interesting sidebar to that: a little research shows that the ranks held by SS have almost no relation to what English or American military ranks might be. SS held positions such as, "Standartenfuehrer," and "Obergruppenfuehrer." Hence, in point of fact, debate over Germer being a Colonel or Lieutenant (even a _Leutnant_ as he is referred to in the story) is entirely (to paraphrase Joey Tribbiani) moo. 

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by: Neftzer (c) 2003 Feedback Appreciated!   
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	2. Hello

_Witchblade_, pre-series.  
*Rated "pW" for Previous Wielder. Deals with past lives. Based largely on conjecture and historical fact.

* * *

Elizabeth Bronte hadn't stopped at the ladies powder room, she'd blown right past it, not even bothering with the fact that she hadn't taken her coat. Doing so would have raised too many questions from Rolf, though he indulged her on most any point, more than willing to benevolently grant any of his mistress' whims. 

She had heard him once, when he did not imagine she listened (or did not care that she did), saying to others in their social circle, "why keep a mistress if not to bestow her with all those things denied one's wife?" 

The comment had not endeared him to her, but it was very much something Rolf would say. And, to take a word from the French, it was (though he would not have been pleased knowing she--nor anyone--thought it such), a very _gauche_ thing to say. 

Once outside the theatre, she took care not to lean against the building's brick exterior. It was December, and though there would be no snow in Paris, the air was cold enough to be uncomfortable. It had been raining for days. The drizzle had let up in the last few hours, but the puddles and rivers such weather created in the street remained. 

Her dress was not made for such weather. Its narrow shoulder straps, and daringly bared back were designed to shock and seduce indoors, in low light--not amidst the post-rainstorm mayhem of this half-alley. She had to keep hold of the hem of her long skirt with one hand to prevent it from trailing through the rain, still running in brisk rivulets to the sewer grates. 

Elizabeth looked down for a moment to insure she had the hem well in hand. In mid-moving of her line of sight, her eyes and vision washed over. 

_The soft fabric in her hands turned to heavy bronze--perhaps gold. Both hands gripped a weighty circle. Her focus refused to completely coalesce and show her clearly what she was looking at. Hands lifted of their own accord, raising their burden, not in a battlefield strike, but in honor--a graceful ceremony. She was crowning someone._

She shook it off. 

She thought back to the film still going inside. _Times Square, New York City_. It was New Year's, and she'd be a liar if she told anyone she wasn't homesick. And then, Major Stretzer had to go and throw a formal party with an American picture as its centerpiece. She harrumphed. 

Thing was, she liked Stretzer. He was funny and generous, and he treated her with a degree of dignity not all officers chose to afford her. 

She sighed. _What would they think about little Lizzybeth back at home, if they only knew?_ She couldn't even be sure which would go over better; if they knew the half of it, or the whole of it. Either way, neither her story, nor her cover story, was for the faint of heart. 

She swore under her breath, a good American curse, wishing there were a nearby can to kick, and her own voice felt foreign to her. Even when translating, English or French, or a half-dozen of the other languages she could speak, to maintain her cover she had always to keep the German edge to her accent. 

She was someone else here, she reminded herself. Someone who had no past--except for the one her handlers had made for her; her deportment the work of British intelligence sculptors, her life story the property of American reconnaissance authors (all working for the State and War Department)--their tutelage of her like birthing a Galatea. Man's fantasy brought to life; at once refined, seductive, cunning, and secretly their ultimate ruin. That was the part she played. 

_A thoroughly modern Mata Hari_, Scott had said proudly back in London, upon her graduation to the field. 

She had wondered at the time if Scott knew much of the real Mata Hari from what was to have been the war to end all wars. The French had executed that woman for her wartime occupation. 

Elizabeth knew better than to imagine a greater longevity for her own self, and she knew better than to let herself feel amenable toward Major Stretzer and his kind. She knew his record, knew what he had done in Poland to gain his rank. He was lower than the lowest thing she could think of; which, at that moment, was him. 

Bronte swore again, more loudly this time, slipping a little more _Nuh Yawk_ in the curse, but still, from long practice, and life-or-death necessity, she pitched the epithet at just above a whisper. 

_The salt of peanuts, a close atmosphere of smoke. The pungency of hops. She saw nothing, but her other senses flamed with stimuli._

A voice spoke to her left. "I know you." 

She turned to see the outline of a tall man in a beret and coat with an upturned collar. This man walked toward her, paying no heed to the alley's many puddles. This was in the present. _This was now._

In different times she did not doubt she would have been unsettled by such a situation--being caught alone in a deserted place, seemingly helpless in the face of what was to come next, but the bracelet on her wrist, less than a year in her possession, had emboldened her in ways she would have never thought possible. Ways that would have made her mother cry. 

Bronte turned to face the voice. She was not far outside the building that had been converted into the night's theatre, and she found she was eager to see the face belonging to the voice--eager enough to ignore the memory tugging at her mind, reminding her that metropolitan Paris was currently under a curfew, and this fellow had no reason to be wandering the streets. A patrol could be nearby, ready and waiting to rescind his papers, beat and jail him for his defiance. 

At the first sight of him a decent woman would have screamed, or at the least run back inside for assistance. But of late, she found herself acting less and less like a 'decent' woman. 

_'I know you,'_ he had said. His voice, like his presence, so unexpected, still rang in her ears. "Do you, now?" she replied to him, using a French accent as flawless as General de Gaulle's own. There was no reason for him to think she was not a fellow Parisian. She calculated that her bold answer would coax him further into the light. 

"That, I do," he said, halting his step on the cusp of shadow. His phrasing's foreign construction nagged at Bronte's mind. Something was not quite right, for all that he had a fine French accent of his own. She waited for the Witchblade to give her a clue. She strained to understand anything it might tell her, any secrets, any revelations. None came. 

His voice was surprisingly flirtatious. It should have put her on her guard. 

"You're the woman's coming home with me tonight," he said, stepping into the light, his face and features displayed for only a moment before he moved to her, blocking any easy access to the theatre's front door. 

Her Witchblade-driven senses relayed that he was packing several guns under his coat, and, instead of a flask, Molotov cocktails in each of his pockets. 

This was no simple curfew scofflaw. 

She didn't need the Witchblade to tell her what that meant. "You're Free French," she said, needlessly aloud, somewhat taken aback. 

He took a step closer, pinning her against the damp brick. "And you," he whispered, as though sharing a distasteful secret. "You're a killer's whore." 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	3. I Know You?

_Witchblade_, pre-series.  
*Rated "pW" for Previous Wielder. Deals with past lives. Based largely on conjecture and historical fact.

* * *

He took a step closer, pinning her against the damp brick. "And you," he whispered, as though sharing a distasteful secret. "You're a killer's whore." 

She felt his knee slide commandingly between her legs, making any flight impossible. He levered the flat of his forearm across her shoulders, so that free movement of her head and neck was all that was left to her. 

_The sensation of him against her, the shock that came from finding she was familiar with how he might smell, the taste of his blood, the way he might choose to move in battle. His name hovering just behind her lips, just beyond her conscious ken. _

Who was this man? An enemy of hers? Of the Blade's? Chasing and circling and flushing out his quarry within the tangled strand that she had come to understand embodied time? What magic did this man have? What understanding? 

It was danger she felt, she was sure of it. Hiding behind his keen eyes, his patchily bearded cheeks. Death and betrayal in every breath he took, distrust between his temples. 

And yet, there was something more. Something feral and basic inside herself that rose up to oppose even this cautionary review of him. Something that allowed some part of her to wait; to boldly, and somewhat haughtily scour his features for any indication of frailty, and weakness that she might catalogue. 

They stood, locked in thrall like two bodies completing a circuit, trapped by the current--beyond forward motion--an infinity of points converging in a single locus. Lightning, having issued a challenge to thunder, waiting. 

Her senses strung tight as a wire, Bronte waited for the Witchblade to wake, waited to feel its armor crawl up her arm. Waited for the moment it would consume her, and any speculation on this man. The Witchblade, she knew, was very pure of purpose, and did not brook distractions. 

"You'll take that back before he kills you," she threatened, in defiance refusing to lower her eyes from his, still looking for any indication of who he was or what it was about him that threw her mind into disorder. 

The weight of his bulk pressed into her--arm across collarbone, knee between thighs, hip to hip--and powerfully held her in place (though she knew, if it would only agree to rouse--if only she could will the talisman to work with her--this man and his makeshift arsenal held nothing _digitabulum magi_ could not render as impotent as a lace handkerchief). 

His voice was low, and gruff in response to her threat. "Your officer'd best get to it quick, then, killin' me, as he's got--" her captor see-sawed his head from side to side in typical French fashion, "oh, I'd say, less than three minutes to live." 

With that he grabbed her left arm hard, and jerked her away from the wall so quickly its brick face scraped along her back, fashionably bared in her evening gown. 

He did not have to drag her to follow him; she ran as fast as he did, spurred on by his prediction, crossing a square and several side streets, as behind them the converted theatre let out a loud pop and collapsed, like a sore erupting, spewing mortar and brick in the place of a body's pus.

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	4. Pop

_Witchblade_, pre-series.  
*Rated "pW" for Previous Wielder. Deals with past lives. Based largely on conjecture and historical fact.

* * *

It was not the sound--nor the sight--she would have expected from a building going down. She had endured the Blitz in London, heard the screaming bombs fall from above, witnessed them fell a house, an office, a man. 

Even so, the starkness of this event was quite different. Had it been more of a boom than a pop, more of an explosion or a cave-in? She could not say. She could only stare at what this man, her captor, had--with unseen helpers--done. 

Her mind skipped like an old Victrola. Rolf had brought her to Paris two weeks ago for the holidays. He had promised her something more exciting than last year's 'status quo,' as he called it, Christmas in Berlin. 

Everyone she knew in Paris was inside that theatre. Every _Schutzstaffel_ contact she had. Every link to a nearly two-year-old deep cover mission to infiltrate Hitler's protective echelon, the most privileged and most-knowledgeable rank of the enemy. Everything her life had become. Everything was inside that theatre. She could not process how she had come to be here, across the square, when her life was there, beneath what was left of that building. 

She needed to breathe. She knew she was breathing already from the run, her breath loud in the dark area where this man--this Free Frenchman--had dragged her to stand. She could hear it, the ragged wheeze, she could feel her diaphragm complain that it was about to give her a cramp. But still her mind remained unconvinced. She desperately needed to breathe. 

Off in the square they had just crossed at breakneck speed, Bronte recognized her shoes, dainty and exquisite evening slippers, made for dancing, made just so for the frivolous officer's mistress by the best cobbler left in Paris. Two-month's wages they'd cost, though to an officer such as Rolf their price was as nothing--laundry money. Paris was his toy chest, his pirate's gold. Nothing was denied him. He paid if it pleased him to do so. If not, he--and the others--took. 

_Her shoes_. She had not noticed them falling off. Bronte suffered a moment of both clarity and vanity as fear for her coveted nylons (a luxury beyond affording for most women) crossed her mind, and instinctively she bent over to examine her feet and see, foolishly, if they had laddered in her barefoot dash over the streets' cobbles. 

"To think," she heard the man say above her, "I bloody well saved your worthless little life." As he spit in response, her brain slowly registered that he had spoken in an Irishman's English, and she moved to straighten her back, to get another look at him, but it was the last thing she knew before her vision went black. 

She had an instant of understanding that he had hit her with his pistol, and then she knew nothing more of nylons or slippers, movie houses or the war, Irish or Frenchmen. There was, instead, only black. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	5. Such Dreams

She dreamed of death, of the Witchblade's own, unspeakable name, of its hunger for things and purposes that she had never even known to exist. Of Rolf, and waking beside him, drowsy on a Saturday afternoon. How his light, almost patrician snore would change just before he awoke. 

She dreamed of sleep, and a long, endless night of restless tossing on an unfamiliar mattress, in unfamiliar pajamas. In the dream she wept, and tore at the sheets around her, unable to wake, or truly rest, caught in a circle of confusion and dimpled timelines. 

She dreamed of a hundred wielders' periculae, and of her own. How the power of the wielder was like liquid fire passing from body to body, as a liquid from cup to cup, vessel to vessel; a transference beyond possession, more akin to containment. Not a confinement, only a giving of shape and form; a movement from inert to the kinetic. The empowerment that came from having substance. 

Which on occasion fell away in the visions--the velocity of substance--where one saw as a ghost, insubstantial, a lucid dream through a seer's opaque sight. 

She had been getting very adept at the visions of late, understanding how to manipulate her interaction with them. Realizing they were a type of overlay, or transparency, on the moment she was actually in. _The now_. She could choose to go in them, or keep her distance and view them as more of a slide show or filmstrip, one foot in each place and time, straddling the divide. 

They lost their in-the-moment clarity over time, she had come to learn. Such portents as she experienced were largely emotion-based, intuitive, and sensual. Smells, textures, instinctive reactions. She could no more have explained what they meant in a logical fashion than she could have described cotton candy to a Bushman. But yet, she understood the Blade when it spoke to her, though it rarely used words. 

She was intimate with it on its will and agenda, its hunger and impulse. Its desires. Even so, they did not always agree. 

She knew that it would be the death of her, was aware through its own shared history how it slowly killed certain parts of all wielders, eroding them, so that if they lost the Blade--or it chose to leave them--they would waste away, as some women pined for a gone lover, a dead child. Husks, their lives willingly bought and sold for the right to wear this talisman. Yes, she knew their deaths. 

In dreams such as the ones she was having, Elizabeth Bronte, New Yorker and spy by trade, shared in each wielder's death as though they were (and they were--each and every one) her own. Such dreams did not make for restful nights. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	6. A man called Jean

When she came to and opened her eyes (the visions and portents she had experienced while unconscious evaporating), Elizabeth was greeted by a familiar face--twenty familiar faces, in fact. She continued to lay flat, as though still unconscious, her memory of the man and the explosion--as well as the throbbing lump on the back of her head--quite clear. 

She was in a cellar; her nose told her that much, and all around her sat--rather indecorously--some of the great works of Western art ever captured on canvas. 

She had heard of this--that when the Nazis had marched into Paris--into the great museums and the grand chateaux, anxious to possess the spoils of their victory, the museums and homes were oddly absent their artwork, and no amount of bribery or torture had yet to produce it. 

And so she knew (as many suspected) it, or at least a sizeable portion of it, to be in the hands of the Free French, languishing in a cellar in--well, she found she was not sure that she was still in Paris proper. The cellar was large enough. She was not likely in a small residence. Rather, a large building; a chateau or cathedral. She had no clue as to her location beyond that. 

Among the canvasses leaned against the wall she faced (some rolled, a few still in their frames) there was a mirror, in whose reflection she saw her solitary guard. 

The man from the theatre was positioned several yards away, sitting, legs up, on an ornate, canopied bed (doubtless, also a museum piece--it looked of Louis XIV). The butt of a machine gun was propped up on one of his thighs, as he stared at her, unblinking. She had not been bound. His face should have been hard to read. He was a complete stranger to her, an unknown quantity, and yet, she knew that for all his external stoicism, he was confused. Befuddled as to why he had brought her here, and by what it was that had made him drag her away from the explosion, instead of leaving her to die with the others, his enemies--seemingly her comrades. It was a question she would have liked to have had answered just as much. And she'd be interested to know why some part of her (and some capriciousness in the Witchblade) had kept her from fighting him when he had threatened, and then kidnapped her. 

His face was a mixture of tiny expressions. A small scar at the corner of his eye that seemed to be a wrinkle, but something in her knew was a result of his hyper-alert, guarded posture. (No matter that the rest of him, in a lounging posture seemed to say he was anything but alert.) The muscle just behind his jawbone in the crook below his ear, that, though she could not see it, she knew would be tensed, his teeth set against each other. His tongue set against the top of his palate, flexed, tense, and curved. 

_How would she know such a thing? Know the way such a private muscle (and a stranger's, at that) would feel against her bare shoulder, her hip, her--?_ Bronte almost broke eye contact with him, ashamed. Instead, she quickly sat up from her place below him, on the floor, asking him dryly, "Do you always stare at your prisoners?" 

"Only the dangerous ones," he responded, changing nothing about his posture or expression. 

"Who, me?" she replied, all innocence. "I don't even have a weapon." 

"It isn't your killing abilities that have me concerned," he said, not adding more, and the space between them again fell silent. 

It was in the next moments she first registered the sound of men drinking on the other side of a partition that did not extend all the way to the ceiling (or floor, as it was a cellar). Their raucous laughter filled in any blanks that she needed filled. It was war, men were still men, and she--to Germans or French--or anyone outside the circle of her deep cover assignment--she was free game, an open-legged collaborator. As dirty and low, and inhuman as they came. She was nothing to them. A Nazi's whore. She didn't deserve their courtesy, or their respect. In their eyes she deserved nothing, save death--though they might delay that sentence indefinitely, in favor of torture and rape. 

And yet, this man of contradictions sat armed vigil near her, keeping them at bay. No wonder the Witchblade had not bothered to wake her. He had seen to it she was undisturbed. 

. 

A younger man rounded the partition, and she saw her captor's grip on the machine gun increase, but the boy did not look at her, and the arm relaxed. 

"Jean," the boy spoke. "The Father says it's time." 

"Send him in," the man the boy called Jean ordered. 

A man closer in age to Bronte walked in (presumably the Father), and he and Jean had a heated--though whispered--argument. Once they were finished, Jean crossed the room to where she sat. "The good Father here'll mind you 'til I get back. And if you don't mind him, he's got my blessing to shoot you." A different man would have smiled at this. He did not. 

"Why am I here?" she asked. "What do you want with me?" 

He did not respond, but turned to leave. 

"Are we in Paris? I must be returned to Paris," she shouted at his retreating back, still in flawless French. "You must take me to Paris!" she declared frantically, raising her right wrist, and the Witchblade, begging it to activate. 

He turned, and in a smooth motion captured her wrist, and the still-braceleted Witchblade, in his large grip. For half a moment--no longer--his eyes seemed to swell with some sensation from contact with the talisman. And then the instant passed. 

She saw nothing--no portent, no future or past, nothing but this man called Jean, gripping her wrist and the for-the-moment latent power it wore. 

He leaned in to her face and told her slowly, "You _will_ stay here until I return. And you will ask no more questions." He did not pause long enough for her to even formulate another before he had rounded the partition, and the sounds of raucous men followed him up, and out of the cellar. 

There was no pain left from his grip on her, but she rubbed at her wrist anyway. She had seen larger and stronger men felled by the mere touch of the Blade on their skin. Armed or not, it was not a thing that tolerated men, and seemed to derive a queer pleasure from bringing them pain. 

_So why not this man?_

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	7. Not convinced

She spent the next hours under the watchful eye of the priest. He sat in the corner and read, ignoring her entirely. She amused herself by leafing through the canvasses littering the space and wondering why she could not convince herself to assay an escape. The priest would be easy enough to incapacitate, for all that attacking a holy man did not sit well with her. 

But, she reminded herself, she did not know her location, whether she was even still in Paris. She had no shoes, was dressed in a slowly deconstructing evening gown, had no money or identification, and was much more accustomed to employing the mystical powers of the Witchblade to translate ancient texts and German codes than using it to slice and dice and slaughter. In deference to such points, she waited. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	8. She said now

When the man called Jean did return, he dismissed the priest and unceremoniously grabbed her by the upper arm, towing her along to the adjoining area on the other side of the partition (the other men did not seem to have returned with him) where--inexplicably--an old piano sat. 

It was a decrepit upright, covered in dust, its once-posh mother-of-pearl flaking off the keys. Its flat surfaces (save the keyboard) were covered in glasses and mugs, and empty tins of drink and food, and bottles. 

He forcibly sat her down on the mismatched chair in front of the instrument. "Play something," he said--the first words he had spoken to her since he left. 

From her new seat, Bronte stared just above the keyboard, at where the sheet music should have been. "Take me to Paris," she said. She did not move to comply with his demand; her arms still at her sides. She did not alter her stare from the space directly in front of her, nor did she modulate the tone of her voice. "I have to go back to Paris." 

"There's nothing there for you," he said, shaking his head. "Nothing but the opportunity for more betrayal--of yourself, and others. Now, play. I should like to hear a tune." 

She felt the barrel of his gun rest between her shoulder blades, through the bed sheet she had thrown around herself against the cellar's cold. The weight of the muzzle against the myriad scrapes and scratches left by the brick wall reminded her of their stinging existence, and the fact that of that building's wall--the converted theatre--and its inhabitants, this memento mori was, for her, all that remained. As he could not see her expression, she allowed herself to wince. 

She consulted the Witchblade's amulet. It had a dull luster, looking like one of a thousand two-dollar pieces of costume jewelry you might buy any day at Woolworth's. So, she played. 

She began with a bawdy saloon song, whose lewdness was apparent in its naughty melody, whether or not one sang the lyrics, which let her get a feel for which keys did and did not work on the ancient keyboard, then launched grandly into _La Marseillese_ in all its pomp, segueing a few minutes later to bang out an angry page or two of Rachmaninoff, before smoothly sweeping into the wistful melody of _Danny Boy_. Deliberately, and mercilessly she milked every haunting glissando for all it was worth. 

The gun barrel to her back began to ease at the first notes of the sentimental tune, but recovered, and as she played on, ground into her spine to the point (just before her big finish) that she for a moment considered that her captor had actually lodged a bullet among her vertebrae, and she had just not heard the gun's report. 

When the last note died, he spoke. "You're no French woman." 

She turned to accuse him as well, "And you're no French_man_." She spit out the first Gaelic that came to mind, an old Irish blessing about happiness and sunny days, and the truest of true loves. "Isn't your war a bit north of here, Brother Fenian?" she asked him, still in Gaelic. 

He answered her in kind, expressing no particular shock at her use of his mother tongue--or her knowledge that it was his mother tongue. "War is wherever it finds you." 

"Is that so, Jean?" She tried to hold down, like a feeling of nausea, the desire to regurgitate her status and mission. To tell this man, this Irishman, everything. Which made no sense to her, either the impulse to do so, or its intensity. She hid her struggle with flippancy. She couldn't break to anyone--perceived 'friend' or not. The visions in the alley the night before had, like all portents had begun to fade already, seeping slowly away, its full power and meaning grown murky. She tried to hang on to the feeling she had experienced that he was a threat to her, to the Blade. She willed the emotion to stick. On her wrist, she felt the Blade stretch, like a lazy cat waking in the late afternoon. 

"Your name's Bronte," the man called Jean asked as much as declared. 

"What's the name of a killer's whore to you?" she countered, with an easy shrug. The Blade's movement had emboldened her. 

"I heard you play once, in London--before I sailed. I was high up in the third balcony--but," his voice broke off. "It was like," he continued in a distracted whisper, "like I could still see your face." 

"So I was a piano player before the war." She shrugged again. 

"Everybody's got to make their living somehow. How about you, Jean?" 

He answered with distraction, as though he were trying to speak and do calculus in his head simultaneously. "I was a painter, then," he said, "once my family shipped me away from home--on account of too many close calls involving guns and rebellion." He smiled a little, his mouth a line. "Still a painter, far as I'm concerned. Only now, I paint in blood." The smile turned bitter--but no less satisfied. "Do ya reckon your blood, Fraulein Bronte, would make a pretty stroke on that there wall? Would even things out, don't ya think, as you were to die last night--with the rest of the enemy." 

At that she stood. "And all that saved me was a memory? A crowded concert hall where an overzealous Irish patron of the arts had, 'a moment' when he thought he knew me?" She was getting close to blowing her cover, she could feel it. Close to telling this man things she was not to tell anyone--ever. _No exceptions._ "When he dreamed about screwing the girl on stage? Well, I don't screw around with the piano, now, Boyo." She forced a grin. "I screw with the big boys." She was trying to enrage him, incite him to violence, so that the Blade would arm in defense of what he might do and take over--so that she could get free. 

But he was not playing along. "They call me Jean," he said, referencing the other men, "but I was born Connor O'Barragh, of County Meath. I don't expect that means anything to you, but I won't kill you, so there's no use trying to work me up to it." 

_Not acceptable_. "You _must_ take me back to Paris!" she shouted, in full-on New York, American English, and her arm came up, and the Witchblade snapped into action. 

"Now!" she roared. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	9. Closer to Paris

The sight of the gauntlet did not fail her. It instantly caused a reaction in him, as he brought his machine gun instinctively to bear. The talisman's armor had grown up the side of her arm, to the shoulder, and across her collarbone to the other. With the Blade she swatted his drawn machine gun away easily, as though he had been holding nothing more than a straw broom, and in doing so she saw a moment pass in his eyes that seemed familiar--as though this had all happened before and they were just now experiencing an echo of it, a ripple effect, or shadow memory--nothing more. Like many things of the Witchblade, the feeling of deja vu passed before she could even analyze it. 

Bronte held her ground, Witchblade at the ready, uncertain of what to do next. Connor O'Barragh stood, unarmed, watching as the Witchblade reverted fluidly back to its jewelry state. 

The man called Jean, now known as Connor, did not ask any questions--not even silently with his eyes--only stepped over to retrieve his gun, find the priest and require him to surrender his boots to Bronte, and then made his way quietly, with her always behind him, not to the building above, but into the tunnels that would carry them (she knew) closer to Paris, if they were not there already. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	10. Tunnel Vision

Kilometres and kilometres of passageway. She could no longer navigate (save by the sight of her captor's retreating back) the tunnels, for the most part, unlit. 

The sound of his boots on the ground, the friction of his coat against the walls when the pathway narrowed. The numberless branches he ignored, or, conversely, chose, in their journey. It may have been calculated to disorient her. She could have laughed. She was disoriented enough from the newest sight the Witchblade had decided to share. 

It was all she could do to follow his lead, the long skirt of her gown wadded, some into each hand, to prevent her tripping. And her perception stepping in and out of another time, another tunnel, another her. 

_Disoriented_, she laughed silently at the word, before the change again washed over her. It was to be one of those times, she realized, where space and time seemed to touch all points, and she lost control of the portent completely, as much a part of it as her own life. 

_Vicious sounds, war sounds. The pungent smell of humanity gone feral. The acridness of torches burnt in closed spaces. Tight stone all around, seized by a claustrophobia she had never before encountered, she moved toward the light--toward the sounds of death and attack, convinced the light would yield freedom. _

Her body coldly sweat from parts encased in armor, the sweat running down her skin, causing involuntarily trembling when it met with exposed flesh. Half or more of her armor had been removed. No, she knew, not removed, taken away. She would ask for it back. She would ask him.

A man's face sprang to mind, his brows dark and forbidding. She knew the face, his name, yet she did not. Still, she would go to him for help--if they had not killed him. 

She rounded the corner. The lights so bright she threw an arm up to hold back the glare. This man stood, at the end of a warrior's gauntlet, either the prize, or the punisher. Disembodied arms and legs, maces and battle-axes flew up and down along the gauntlet, accompanied by men's cries and screams. Here was the death; here was the moment before resurrection. Here was what she must do: die. 

One second and she would have stepped into the gauntlet. Something--someone--lifted her right hand to his face. The Asian man she had seen what seemed so long ago--before the theatre explosion, after the theatre explosion, during the theatre explosion. There was no before, no after, no during, no was or will be. Only, the Asian man. 

He took her hand and she turned to him, the gauntlet and the other men--the dark eyebrows--melting away, gone. He lifted her hand to his chin, letting the back of her knuckles rest just below the front of his jaw. He had been speaking the entire time, but it was only this she heard, "all connected," he said, his wistful smile allowing her to focus, and again see the now, the retreating back of Connor O'Barragh's leather coat, and find her way on through the tunnels. 

Though he did not speak again, and though he became more transparent, less a part of the now, the Asian man did not leave her until the light coming in was, indeed, from above ground, and she and Connor, as a pair, began to ascend. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	11. Delusions of the Familiar

They came to the end of the catacombs inside an abandoned shop, their tunnel-run completed. _La Belle Aurore_ was still readable on the half-shattered front window facing the street. What few chairs were left were broken and overturned, dust settling heavy all around. Once-shattered glass (from drinking vessels and windows) had been broken so long most had been ground down (from heavily-booted footsteps) to near-dust itself. 

The odd checked curtain, still hanging from the odd curtain rod still attached to its wall supports, caused any natural light to be scattershot at best, making it difficult for Bronte to tell what time of day it might be--only that it was not night. 

Jean (now known as Connor) paused to look and see whether they would be noticed upon their exit onto the side street the café fronted. While he did this, Bronte found a moment to adjust her bunching stockings after their journey from the cellar. 

"Wait," she directed--more than asked--him, realizing her stockings had torn free of the garters holding them in place. This realization of her potentially disheveled self also brought to mind that her hair had not been straightened, combed, or looked-after since well before the explosion. There was no way she could step out onto the street looking like she'd gone through, well, everything she'd gone through. It simply wouldn't wash. They would be stopped, they would be questioned. They would be detained. 

Connor paused at her demand, throwing a look over his shoulder from where he was scouting any activity surrounding their position, and she moved to the counter where a stray piece of mirrorized glass had caught her eye from where it lay broken, but still useful. 

She unceremoniously lifted the floor-length skirt of her evening gown (there was no time for modesty) to mid-thigh-level, wishing the Witchblade could be coaxed into repairing the nylon and metal contraption of her garter belt. 

It was cold enough in the gown she was still wearing--and the nylons went a long way to keep her legs warm--but they had ripped irreparably out of their pinnings (there was simply nothing left of their tops to hook into the garter belt's buckles), and there was nothing to do now but strip the stockings off in favor of better mobility, as they had fallen into bunches at her ankles and, in the Father's borrowed jackboots, she was tripping on them with each step. 

She knew his eyes were on her as she stripped the torn nylons (all but shredded from her recent activities) off her legs, and stuffed the stockings into each of the toe of the oversized boots. 

She could feel the abandoned café wanting to swirl around her until it faded into vision. She struggled to hold it at bay, to keep her hold on the now. Even so, intuition and a memory that was both hers, and not hers at the same time, reminded her that this would not be the first time she had dressed--nor undressed--in front of this man. 

_"Come back to bed," she heard a voice plead from the edge of the vision, beyond what she could see of another room, another mirror, another time. _

In response to the request she felt her own face contract--against her will--into a broad smile. A true, bright, grinning smile she had not worn since before the war. Before ten-hundred-thousand necessarily convincing (but insincere) smiles. 

La Belle Aurore, dust, checkered curtains, Bronte chanted to herself, in a desperate effort to center back on the now. This was no time to be having a vision. 

"You're in me thrall," the voice coaxed. 

She didn't want to see, but there it was, another place, another time, another--him. Wound in bedsheets, shirtless and sleeping (though midday sunlight streamed through nearby windows), tattoos encircling his upper arms. In the vision she reached to touch one, not meaning to wake him. 

As her finger came to rest, ever so lightly, on the Celtic bands emblazoned on his flesh, a shift occurred, like an hourglass run out and inverted for the next hour's tracking. Noises for which she had no point of reference assaulted her; beeps and whirrs, a sound like bellows on a dying fire. Jean/Connor was still abed, but there was no cheerful sunlight here. For all that she did not know this place, could not name the pipes and hoses and tubing that seemed to be growing from him like a new breed of plants, springing from his body, she knew. Hospital, she thought, and the vision was over. 

. 

Back in the now (back inside _this_ vessel, Elizabeth Bronte), her hands were grabbing and tugging (not very successfully) at her hair. She had pulled out what of her hair had remained in her expensive, long-forgotten New Year's Eve coif. She tried to smooth it, with only her hands as combs, and her only reference point the shard of glass. It was a mess. 

Like so many other times, she swallowed the vision like a child downing butter beans at an adult's insistence, hoping to better decipher it at a later time, when she could afford the luxury of introspection. 

"Your back," he spoke, an edge of surprise to his voice. "What have you done to it?" 

She was actually able to smile, if somewhat grimly, the emotion perhaps left over from the early part of the vision. 

A choice of levity, she hoped, would keep him to his side of the room. "Oh, nothing. Just some mick pretending to be Free French jammed me up against a brick wall." 

She went back to the problem of her hair. 

He left his post at the window to cross the room. She did not turn around. 

Her back was to him, and the shard of mirror was too small to reflect his actions, but when he reached her, she felt his free hand reach out and float lightly over the myriad scrapes across her bare, injured shoulder blades and backbone. She tried, and nearly succeeded, but could not hold back a slight shiver. His touch, unbidden and unnecessary, both stung and comforted. He did not apologize, not for this, nor for the original injury. 

It was as though he was looking at her for the first time since the explosion. "Your dress," he noticed, his fingertips migrating to her now-precariously worn shoulder straps, "it's fallin' off ya." 

He was not wrong. The fashionable silk with which it was made was not meant to withstand hard use--and neither was the delicate stitching holding the seams of the gown together. Her skin peeked through in more than one place where the thread had already given way, where hooks and eyes no longer held. 

"Stop," she said, anticipating his hand hovering above her left hip, ready to touch the three and a half inches of ripped seam to be found there. 

She had a very different kind of vision at that moment. One that was not at all supernatural in origin, one where she could feel his warm, curious hand slide through the tear, between silk and skin. Stop, she told herself this time. 

The Witchblade, amused, winked at her. Had it been a cat she would have been tempted to kick it for playing its capricious game with her: one minute he's an enemy, the next a conquest, the next? She could hardly speculate. 

Bronte found her fingers were too cold to do her bidding where her hair was concerned. Aloud she announced, "I just have to be uninteresting enough so that no one bothers to take a second look at me--at us." 

"Here," he offered, busying his troublesome hands with setting down his machine gun, and removing his beret for her own use. 

She fixed the wool cap onto her unkempt hair. Problem solved. 

"Have this, too," he suggested, pulling his arms out of his leather coat, and settling it around her shoulders, as though it were a fur and they were on their way to the opera. 

"What will you do?" she asked, turning to see him left only in his large woolen sweater. 

He ignored her question and avoided any comment on her revised appearance. Instead, he took up his gun and stashed it in an old press behind the counter, where he swapped it for a large black bumbershoot, and directed them out onto the street. 

"What day is it?" she remembered to ask, having no idea how much time had passed since she had been in captivity. 

"Why, it's New Year's Day," he answered. "Nineteen forty-two." 

As they set off in the rain, she could not believe how much had come to pass in the space of a single night, for all that that night had spanned from one year into the next. 

She thought of Ginger Rogers' character in _Bachelor Mother_ from what she now knew was just the night before. That woman's New Year's was spent in a borrowed hat and coat as well--but hers, rather, a luxurious fur, with a giant corsage, spending a New Year's so bright she hadn't seemed to even notice the cold, her problems nothing more than a wispy construct of the screwball farce, easily fallen into, and easily solved in the last moments of the final reel. 

A final reel that never got a chance to play the night before. And a building of revelers--her lover among them--crushed and broken like the brick that buried them. Rolf's nose, broken now. All broken, everything broken, save the code she had been sent here to decipher. Her ties to the SS, all broken. Her mission: busted. Her cover, still in tact, but teetering closer to being exposed every moment she spent with this man beside her, and the compulsions he inspired in her--in the Blade. 

There had been no kiss from Rolf, no goodbye on the cheek, no tangle of lips at the strike of twelve. Broken. And she had no time to dissect the way she felt about that. 

_Happy 1942_, Elizabeth Bronte wished herself hollowly, the ancient bumbershoot her kidnapper held pockmarked with threadbare spots, letting in as much of the downpour as it managed to keep away. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	12. Question and No Answers

It became apparent to her in a very short while that they had never left Paris proper, though they were a good long walk--and several arrondissements--away from where she needed to be. In the early morning rain the city still slept, and their progress of crossing the town went largely unnoticed. 

"I don't know why I'm doing this," Connor said to her at one point as they crossed the street, a new hint of desperation hidden in the timbre of his voice. "But when we get where we're goin' you're going to tell me." 

Bronte didn't answer. She didn't argue or agree. She was much too occupied with what she might find when she returned to her hotel. How would she explain her absence, or her escape? Would she be questioned? Would they suspect she had been taken by Free French? 

One theatre of Nazis hardly expunged their entire presence in Paris, or diminished their grip on the city--no matter the high ranks of those involved. The Third Reich still held Paris and its denizens in a stranglehold, thanks in large part to the efficiency of _der Fuhrer_'s personal guard, the SS. And if there was one thing the SS demanded--Bronte knew from experience--it was answers. 

Most likely they thought her dead, along with the others. _Along with Rolf_. A few days, a week, even, might pass before they sifted all the way through the rubble and discovered that she was not among it. She did not imagine that it would be taken lightly that she was not. It would put her under immediate (and potentially harsh) scrutiny in a city of unfamiliar bureaucrats and no acquaintances of which to speak. 

Deep in a brown study, she swallowed repeatedly to hold back the panic trying to rise within her, and spurred herself on to devise a convincing, even if not able to be corroborated, alibi. 

She took no notice of the coatless man next to her, holding the rottening silk bumbershoot over their heads, his own face a testimony of contradictions, an urgency not unlike panic propelling him forward, into whatever trap she chose to lead him. Unused to taking orders, he would nonetheless follow. The sight of the gauntlet, and the familiar, disruptive aura of the woman he now escorted had inspired that much fealty in him, at the least. He would see this journey through. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	13. What Child Is This?

By the time they arrived at the modest apartment of Frau Beinder (a German émigré), Bronte felt as though they had swum the Channel six times over--and from the downpour they were nearly as wet, but the sensation of dampness and exhaustion abated (at least for her) quickly enough at the door of Frau Beinder's apartment, when four-year-old Mabel Bronte shot down the hall, across the room, and into her arriving mother's open and waiting arms. 

For that moment, her face buried in the wiggling neck and shoulders of her daughter, Elizabeth Bronte forgot all about Rolf, the hard floor of the cellar, the emotions and sensations the man called Jean inspired in her. She forgot about having to return to her hotel, and the questions the SS were sure to ask, most insistently. 

She almost, nearly, forgot about the Witchblade. But then, if not for the Witchblade, she would still be back on the hard floor of that cellar, demanding to be brought back to Paris, her words falling on deaf ears. 

As always, the circuity of logic where the Witchblade was concerned produced its own litany-like hymn of thanks, ending with; and if not for Rolf, no Witchblade. And so, in even this small way, she blessed Rolf, who had unwittingly given, with his hand, the gift that could possibly--even now, even in this moment of indirection and confusion--bring down the mightiest, and scatter his beloved Third Reich beyond re-gathering. And so she smiled for herself, and even for Rolf, for in his accidental, and unmeaning way having kept her daughter safe. 

. 

Bronte, after a moment having come back to herself, introduced to Connor the older woman who had answered the door. "This is Gretl Beinder," she said. "When I am out she has been kind enough to watch my daughter, Mabel." 

Mabel, hugging to her mother's leg, smiled up at the tall stranger in the wet woolen sweater, and extended him greeting in her pretty, well-spoken German. 

Taking in the child's looks, her bright blonde hair, her eyes the color and disposition of Spring skies, Connor asked, without regard for tact, "Is she his?" He was more than a little taken aback by the existence of the child. 

Bronte looked up. She saw in his eyes no judgment or disgust, only surprise. "No," she answered him, offering no other explanation, her terse response about Mabel's parentage a challenge in and of itself. 

He did not push for more. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	14. On the edge of a Blade

Gretl had gone for blankets, and once having dispensed them, sent the group into her kitchen to warm themselves by her cast-iron stove, not staying herself, but disappearing again to find Bronte some dry street clothes, so that she might make her way on to the hotel where Rolf had taken rooms for them, and to her luggage, more suitably attired. 

Gretl's kitchen and Mabel's presence had an odd effect on the tension that hung between herself and Connor, Bronte noted. It was such an everyday setting--old-time, pre-war everyday (she could hardly think of the last time she'd sat down in a full-size, working kitchen--not been served at table, as though her food had simply been wished into being, or heated and stirred over the lone hot plate in the flat Rolf paid for in Berlin--when they weren't staying somewhere more lavish). The sights of it, the smells and even the emotion trapped in the room, so normative, so cozy. She knew the change in setting dropped at least three (if not more) of the barriers she usually had up around herself. 

She could see it working on him, too. She had no indication, no idea at all, of how long it had been since he had spent time in a home--not in a tunnel, or cellar, or burnt-out building. 

Gretl's home was nothing special, but it was a home, and, even without meaning to, something in them recognized that, and shifted their behavior to match. The immediateness of their troubles only moments before so pressing were momentarily muted, the by turns prickly-then-charged exchanges they had been sharing ceased, falling away from them like a shell from a peanut, forgotten and unnecessary. 

Almost drowsily he pulled his rain-soaked sweater over his head, the weight from the water it had retained making the journey over his shoulders and neck more difficult than it should have been. The wall clock ticked, but they paid it no mind. Connor arranged his sweater near the stove's heat, and set to removing his second shirt to join it, obviously hoping to dry out as much as possible before re-entering the downpour. 

. 

As Bronte sat at the table, trying to get warm, wrapped in a blanket, Mabel on her lap, the young girl grabbed for a nearby knife--among some other stray utensils Gretl kept on the table. 

"No, no," Bronte cautioned, her hand closing around the dangerous object before the child's could. 

_"Yeah?" She heard, in a throatier, panicked version of her own voice. She had thrown a man against a wall. Was demanding something of him. His nose and lips were bleeding, and he looked as scared as any man who believed he was about to die could. The wall smelled of old smoke and damp stone. _

"Pez," she heard from beyond her fog of concentration, over her shoulder, "I'm not down with this." For a moment a second man came into view. His eyes look almost as frightened of her as did those of the man against the wall. 

"Fine, leave," she demanded. Her anger and panic too focused to even pause long enough to care if he did. 

. 

"What's this, what's this? What's your mama gone and done, Fraulein Mabel?" 

Bronte smelled his bare flesh before she saw clearly again. The salt and tang of it. The warmth the fire had given to him. 

Connor was standing over her at the side of the table, but had thrown his blanket off. He had been huddling--much like herself--under a blanket until his sweater and shirt dried enough to put back on. 

She tried not to notice his bare chest as she struggled to bring herself up to speed on the now, and bury the vision. Her hand was still around the knife. 

It had probably been less than a second or two since she had taken it out of Mabel's path, but in that span (the span of the vision) her right hand had slid down its blade, gripping it tighter and tighter, and now she was bleeding. Hence, the alarm, and the fact that he now had her hand in his, prying it (she tried to relax it) off the knife's blade, and grabbing at a nearby rag to blot away the blood so that he could examine the severity of the cut. 

"It's nothing," she said, trying to withdraw her hand. "I'm sure." She didn't even feel any pain beyond a sting, her nerves so filled by the vision's sensations. 

He didn't respond verbally, but looked up for a moment, so that she could see his unconvinced expression, and continued to work at it, holding both her, and Mabel's, full attention. 

When he finally was satisfied, and had relaxed some of his hold on her hand, looking for something to bind it with, the light cast down from the overhead bulb just so that she saw a scar, just to the left of his sternum, near his heart. 

As if of its own accord, her hand floated up, toward the spot, taking one of his (the one cradling hers) with it. 

"The Blade did this," she said, though he could not have understood her remark. The Witchblade pinched her happily on the wrist, as though it thought they were sharing some private joke. Not finding it funny, she winced. 

"A blade?" he asked. "No," he assured her, giving a half smile, one of his first. "That's an old scar. Lost a dare when I was ten. Nasty fall. You'll not have to worry about a scar. It's only a small cut, just as you said," he comforted her, misunderstanding her interest in the wound's mark. 

But she had seen it clearly, had not fallen into the vision, but had witnessed it just the same. 

_A redhead with the Blade, full-armed, and Connor full-seeing her, and the talisman she wore. And that same Blade, that same deadly bauble, gracing her own wrist just now, sinking slowly and difficultly into him. In just that very spot._

"No, I--" the fingers of her wounded hand climbed over that place on his chest, as though assessing it for damage, the meat of her palm below the thumb pressed into his bare breastbone, and for a moment he let her hand do as it pleased, looking down on her as she tentatively examined the spot, his expression as curious as her own. Then, his hand followed hers, and brought it away from him, out to where he could wrap her palm, bound in a few windings of clean cheesecloth he had found. 

As he was tying off the cheesecloth bandage, his fingers rested for a moment on the metal of the Blade, and Bronte saw her vision a second time--this time in reverse, winding backward in on itself, the Blade coming out of him, the redhead, gauntletless. 

When she looked up, the re-visitation over, the cast of his eyes showed that he had seen something as well, something that had given him a furrowed brow--if only momentarily. 

And, with every bit of the finality of Cinderella's ball at the clock's twelve-stroke, they were no longer simply in a kitchen, warm and protected from the elements, drowsy and aimless. They were, now, again, waiting, with very specific ends in mind and an immediate future to consider. The world existed again, beyond the room, beyond Paris. 

"When will you tell her," Connor asked, inclining his head toward Mabel, still happily at play, ignorant of the last moment's shift in priority and exigency. 

Bronte respected that he hadn't referenced the explosion of the night before directly, but there was nothing for it, no reason to wait. She had taught Mabel enough about the world. The world they lived in had done its share as well. For the child, death was not unfamiliar. And for the mother, her child's innocence on such matters was not something she could even afford to mourn. 

"May," she said, using the girl's pet name. "Herr Rolf has died." 

"Sorry, Mama," the child said, turning around to look into her mother's face. Her own eyes showed that, to the best of a four-year-old's comprehension, she understood. Herr Rolf was not coming back. 

She turned her attention back to the table, where she was putting the forks to sleep under a dishtowel. "Hush!" she told them, only their tines exposed. "Say, 'Goodnight.'" 

Connor pushed back the chair he had been sitting in, its legs grating against the wooden floor, and scowled as he contemplated going to find Gretl and the promised street clothes for Bronte himself. 

Elizabeth watched him, wishing she could pace the room herself, wishing she could explain the path she had chosen, the decisions she had made, for herself and her child. Wishing she could do so in a way eloquent enough to make him understand, to share with him the things she knew--the things the Blade had given her to understand--but with so much at risk she could not, even if she were able to do so, and so she said nothing. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	15. Danger in numbers

Minutes passed in silence while they continued to wait for Gretl's return. Mabel resumed playing with a cup and the remaining silverware on the table. Connor reached over into the pocket of his leather coat--the one Bronte had worn since their stop in the café--and withdrew a battered sardine tin, opening it to offer her a cigarette. 

Bronte accepted, absentmindedly, nearly lulled back into complacency by the fire, and the presence of her daughter, now safe. She watched as Connor took a smoke for himself, and moved to find a taper on the stove to light them. 

As he ignited hers she leaned in toward him and the lighted taper he held. Her eyes ran down the side of the cigarette poised between her lips, and she looked at it for a long moment, and before taking her first drag, removed it from her mouth. 

There, clasped between her first and second fingers, sat a genuine, bona fide, accept-no-substitutes American smoke. 

She (almost too-hastily) put it to her lips and took a long, full drag. As good to her as a view of the Statue of Liberty, or an over-crowded bus ride to Manhattan. 

On this day of all days, as precious as the voice of President Roosevelt. The smell of stale popcorn mingled with the sea at Coney Island. Her father's deep, rumbling laughter over the hijinks of Bob Hope on the radio in their front parlor come a Sunday afternoon. Bronte found her eyes wanting to water, and not from the smoke. 

. 

Connor was seated to her left, his back to the stove and his clothing drying there. He inhaled, his cigarette identical to hers, a crease forming in the center of his forehead, his eyes glossing over, absenting his attention from the room for a moment. He was trying to concentrate, clearly oblivious to her thoughts, or Mabel's continuing, quiet game. 

There were only a few ways, Bronte knew, a man like Connor O'Barragh could have gotten his hands on such contraband as she and he sat here smoking. And each and every one of those ways required that he be much more on the inside than she had guessed. 

Much deeper into the movement and the Resistance than she--or the Witchblade--had yet intuited. After all, there was no American military presence in Paris, or near Paris--at least none the SS knew about. And in her solitary work, she at best knew only what the SS knew (which was considerable). And as far as their sources indicated, Paris was a city locked down, impenetrable, and they were working swiftly to make the rest of the country, in short order, follow suit. 

And so, discovered possession of this tiny roll of homespun, Yankee pride could get this man worse than killed--it could get him tortured until he wept blood. Whatever information he had would be invaluable to either side; the Allies needing it protected, the Axis, exposed. 

It was as though, for a moment, her stomach lost its bottom, and a desperate, wild desire to distance herself from him, and whatever he knew, began to grow by twos inside of her. Like carriers of separate strains of plague, singly they were dangerous--but containable as long as they remained solitary, the damage they could cause manageable, compartmentalized. But, together their value to the enemy (their likelihood of being captured or suspected) increased exponentially, the consequences should they be tortured and break--possibly catastrophic. 

There was no time. She had to get as far away from him as quickly as possible. Combined, their knowledge (their very acquaintance) formed an equation where "x" equaled death and disclosure (not quickly, but with all finality), and that was a possibility she, and Mabel, Scott and the boys back in London, and the Witchblade simply could not afford to entertain. She could never, ever, even so much as imagine seeing him again. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	16. No

With a suddenness that surprised her in its velocity, the ticking of the wall clock became, to her mind, louder than the beating of her own heart. 

_Where was Gretl? What could be taking so long?_

Elizabeth Bronte took one last puff--like a champagne toast--to the unknown Joe who had gifted Brother Fenian, here, with this heavenly smoke. And who had, inadvertently, emboldened one incredibly lonesome New Yorker with proof of his presence. But even for such a Joe she could not spare more than a passing thought. 

"You have to go now," she told Connor, her voice taking on a ragged edge as she spoke the words. An edge not unlike the one she had heard in the vision, shouting at the bleeding man up against the wall. 

"Says you," Connor shot back, his reaction to her demand and tone a petulant one. "I brought you here--never said you weren't coming back with me. So now you've got your wee one safe, we leave. No more waiting." He grabbed at his shirt. He didn't show it, but it was obviously still far from dry. 

_She could not see who she was talking to, the space in front of her was unfocussed. She gripped her right wrist, the Witchblade on it, almost painful in her desperation. "Is this the reason you were killed? Is this in your journals? They're missing." Her nose stung as though she might cry from frustration, from pity. _

Mist parted. Another scene; Connor, bound and bleeding, under guard. It seemed a scene of torture. "I'm to be his retribution, then?" he declared. "Tie it on me." 

No, Bronte said, coming into the now. "No." 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	17. Faith

She sat Mabel down on the chair (perhaps harder than she meant to), grabbed up his borrowed coat, removed his beret, tossed them to him, and began to work at the frequently repaired (which was to say multi-knotted) laces of the Father's boots on her feet. "There is no question about this," she said. "You'll go now, without another word, and you won't stop going until you've got yourself to someplace safe that you trust." 

He looked perplexed at her sudden resolve, almost finding humor in her sudden shift and desperation. Even so, he continued to dress himself to leave. 

She finally got the first boot free, in the better light noticing a scripture verse painstakingly burnt into the inside of the leather tongue of the boot. "Faith," Bronte said, quoting it, "'is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' Have no faith in people, Brother Fenian," she cautioned, almost having unlaced her way out of the other boot. "No hope that when they're out of your sight they're up to goodness and light. Not today. We'll each of us betray the other. It's only what we desire in exchange that makes our stories interesting and separates us." It was imperative she convince him to go. 

"Do you think I'd not sell you out for my child? Not kill you with my own hands should it come down to it? And do you think better of yourself than that? That you wouldn't do the same to me, if they hurt you badly enough? Threatened someone you cared for? Don't say no. I'm just _une poule_ you met last night." 

His brow stiffened as though he would defend her from her own use of the pejorative term. 

Like a newsreel taking place over his shoulder, she saw the vision, distant, but awful in its immediacy. _He was in a green shirt. A hooded man came after him, then another and another until they subdued him, bagging his head and tossing him around like something lower than an animal; with less intelligence, less dignity and less value. The fear and confusion he felt was as palpable as had it been hers--even as it mingled with her own, spurred on by the portent._

"Do you know what an SS lover can teach you?" she asked, playing any and every card she had to get him out the door and keep him from ever trying to find her. "Huh? They can teach you two things: pain and power. And any gentility they have evaporates the moment they discern that you might be 'other.' And then, the powerful create pain. Until they get what they want. And don't think--" her throat almost clouded with the effort of it all, as she spoke her catechism to him--her own great fear, her great dread. "Don't _ever_ think you're above that." 

She leaned over the chair, tossing the second boot into Connor's perplexed arms. His face showed that he wasn't certain what to do next; grab her by the hair--and Mabel, too--and drag them kicking and screaming to wherever the night's Free French hideout was to be? Demand that they follow? Attempt to argue his case? He stood, for the moment, directionless, only his sweater to be put on before he was ready to leave. 

"They're coming," Bronte told Connor, desperately sure it was so. "Gretl has gone to call them from the telephone next door." She cracked a crooked and somewhat sour smile. "Don't let her fool you--she's as much a collaborator as myself--or as little Mabel, here." 

"Heil!" declared Mabel, lifting a fork in Nazi stiff-armed salute, a cherubic smile crossing her face. 

Connor looked from mother to daughter and back again, searching for some answer on his own, obviously not quite as convinced as to her status as a traitor as he had been the night before. 

Bronte took the opportunity his reticence gave her. "May," she spoke to her daughter, her hand resting on Mabel's head to help focus the child's attention. "Go very quietly, please, and see what is taking Frau Beinder so long to return. Do not disturb her, though. Do you understand? Then come directly back here." Mabel nodded, and silently slid off her chair and into the main part of the house in search of its owner, as though she were beginning an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. 

Since he did not move for it, Bronte gathered up his wool sweater and thrust it at him. "There will be questions to answer. As long as they've got me they'll be mostly satisfied." She felt like she was back at university, again co-captaining the debate team. "Luckily I've got a bad bump on the head, some nasty scrapes, a ruined evening gown, and blisters already raising on my feet to back up my story--that I stepped outside for some air, was knocked out by the blast, found by a nice fellow who brought me back here at my request. An angel," she said, and gave an involuntary sigh, which she only half-caught before letting it out. "Who, upon delivering me to Gretl and the arms of my daughter--_disappeared_." She stressed the word, holding his gaze as long as was comfortable. 

When she finally had to look away from the scrutiny of his expression, his eyes moving as though they were struggling to decode her as if she were unfamiliar text, she tossed the end of her American cigarette into the kitchen fire, lest even such a tiny clue impede her story. 

She had no more to say. She rushed him into his coat, opening the kitchen door softly as he skeptically, and hesitantly, settled the beret back on his head. She pressed the barely-of-use umbrella into his hands. She imagined for a moment him returning it to the press under the counter at the abandoned La Belle Aurore. The idea almost made her feel nostalgic. Neither spoke. 

The last thing she saw of him, he stood for a moment under the door's awning, the rain to his back, and spoke. She feared for an instant that he would refuse to leave. Dread washed over her like an influenza chill. 

"I do know you," he said, nodding. "You are not who you are." 

"It's war," she answered, affecting a lighter tone than she felt, and holding back a second shiver, "I think we none of us are." 

He reached out his hand as though he would brush her cheek or smooth her hair in farewell, but she took a step backward, the light of the kitchen shining out from behind her into the grey street. 

He withdrew the hand, and though he carried it, made no move to open the bumbershoot as he stepped onto the same grey street, retreating at pace farther and farther from the patch of light until the rain obscured his figure entirely, as though the downpour were washing away his very existence in her world. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	18. Heaven

He had been gone several long minutes when Mabel returned to her play at the table, as Bronte used a corner of her blanket to towel at her wet hair. 

"Who was that man, Mama?" the little girl asked. 

"That, baby," Bronte told her, "was an angel." 

"Oh," Mabel responded, seriously, "will he take Herr Rolf to heaven?" 

"No, May," she answered (the idea of the man she had spent the last two years with not resting peacefully in heaven should have distressed her), "somehow I don't think so." Before she knew it she found her fist, bound as it was in cheesecloth, scrubbing at her eyes until she couldn't tell the difference between the cold feeling in her gut and the tears of irritation trying to run down the side of her nose. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	19. Can't Spare a Dollar

Surprisingly, Gretl had not made any calls, had not notified the SS that Bronte had miraculously survived the Free French's bomb, though the nanny had heard some news of the blast. It seemed Gretl was more interested in finding out when the Nazis would be re-opening the factory at which she worked so that she could make a more regular wage than babysitting the children of visiting German officers and their mistresses afforded. 

The clothes she had gone in search of were not her own, and she had climbed into the attic to oblige Bronte, bringing down some of her mother's dresses. Which was more than generous, Frau Beinder not being a thin woman. Mother Beinder had died several years ago, and though her frocks were far from fashionable, any one of them would get Bronte appropriately dudded up to arrive back at her hotel. 

As for Gretl's unexpected lack of intuition about her current employer's precarious state where the Germans were concerned, the only thing Bronte could speculate was that Gretl took one look at the man who brought her to the house to fetch Mabel, and had decided her employer was, perhaps, playing the field (to her own good fortune that night). 

Or, perhaps, Gretl really was simply too busy to care. And too shortsighted to realize the status and reward she would likely have received for handing Bronte over for suspicious behavior. 

. 

In the borrowed clothes, Bronte returned, with Mabel, to the posh hotel where she and Rolf had been staying for the holidays. Everything was there, just as she had left it. Everything except her money, and her papers. 

The hotel bill was not yet paid. Nor the meals, nor any of a dozen other bills that had been delivered to her rooms. Wine bills, tailoring costs, her lost evening slippers, the services of hairdressers and manicurists, flowers delivered to the room--to other rooms. 

No one could say that Rolf was not generous, and, Rolf carried the money, always. "One cannot expect munificence from an empty wallet," he used to chide other officers, clicking his tongue at their behavior as though they were errant schoolboys. 

Bronte had less than three francs to her name, and that, something she kept in her lingerie drawer for cab fare. There was nothing in the city Rolf could not acquire--if not through payment, then through forced repossession. It was a fact from which she often benefited. But with no Rolf, there was no way to make his (and her) debts disappear. Had he chosen, he would have shredded the stack of bills on the dresser, ripped them casually in two, and no one would have dared challenge him. 

She was not so lucky. Until she could settle these accounts, it was far from likely that she would be able to check out of the hotel. With Rolf she had status, she was someone with whom to be reckoned. Alone, she was simply one of a thousand single mothers struggling in Paris, trying to get by. No one was going to bend the rules for that. 

And the fear of being caught--with Mabel--trying to sneak out on both the bills and the hotelier? Not an acceptable option. 

Worse than having no money, she had had her papers with her that night, tucked smartly into her evening bag with lipstick and gloves; it was dangerous to travel even the shortest distance without them--even for SS. Any money that she had was back in Berlin, with no simple way to get at it, short of returning to Berlin and fetching it herself--which she could not do without papers. Papers which also served as Mabel's sole identification. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	20. Necessity is a Mother

Within hours of returning to the hotel she was told (news traveled slowly, and sometimes inaccurately) that everyone in attendance at the theatre that night had been killed, either in the initial explosion, or in the ensuing hours of rescue work that was done sifting through the rubble. Elizabeth knew no one in town beyond the dead, whose bodies were to be shipped to Berlin in three days' time. Without money for tickets, or papers for identification, she was effectively stranded in Paris, far from her mission, farther still from her single British contact. Far from the intimate circle of SS in which she had--until the explosion--moved. She was now little more than a disinteresting dead Nazi's mistress. 

Yet, it was this very predicament that she found protected her from SS scrutiny. An officer's mistress (it became apparent) was hardly anything to get worked up about (particularly a dead officer whom one did not personally know), and as _she_ was not dead, they must have assumed (had they even stopped to think about it) that she had, for whatever reason, not attended the party that night. 

To confess the loss of her money and papers would be to confess (or at least infer) her attendance, and furthermore, her escape, which begged further questions. So, she sat in her hotel suite with Mabel, taking solitary meals with her child, and racking her brain over how to get back in the war, and the game she had been trained to play. 

With Rolf dead, she needed a new in, and she needed to get in some sort of contact with London to let them know what happened. But her cover was so deep (perhaps at most three men at British Intelligence knew anything of her assignment--if that) it would be nearly impossible to do. 

If her cover were broken, even half the truth of her dual-life known, she would be executed without preamble. Bronte would never allow herself to think what might become of Mabel in such an instance, or what measures she would--if pushed--take to protect her child. How far she would go. Rather, she put her faith solidly in the Witchblade; the only friend she had in all of Paris. She _would_ think of something. Because there was no other option. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	21. Other Voices, Other Rooms

That night--the night going into the third of January, 1942--Elizabeth Bronte slept with dreams, and visions of dreams. She saw again and again the Blade sinking into the chest of Connor, only to withdraw a moment later to replunge a second--or third--an infinity of times. The vision rocking back and forth in a timeline not her own, like a wooden toy Mabel had back in Berlin, or a teeter totter from her own childhood. 

The man from the tunnel vision--the dark browed knight that had been waiting for her at the end of the gauntlet--would appear, and her attention would be drawn away from Connor to him, instead. And always, with his arrival, the scene would play again; the Blade burying itself in the heart of the man she had sent away. And every time it was as though it were her heart that seized and refused to continue beating--not his--the living metal of the Blade skewering something buried within her as well. 

She awoke often, only to find herself again in a lucid dreaming state, the visions hung so heavily about her that she did not recognize her own hotel room. Did not see the open trunks, the balcony that looked out onto the city of Paris, Rolf's perfectly pressed SS uniform hanging in wait for him on the front of the chifforobe. 

What she saw instead were unfamiliar, unplastered walls, devices scattered on the nightstand that held no meaning for her. The space was like that of a warehouse, but outfitted as more of a bedsitter. The covers wound around her legs were cotton, not satin. The clothes she wore tight and soft, their material and fit foreign--not at all like the peignoir she had put on for the night. 

Bronte collapsed back onto the unfamiliar mattress, stared at the unseen ceiling and tried to repress a desire to scream. It was a curse, this Witchblade. Perhaps it had chosen--for whatever reason--to drive her to madness. If it would but speed the process to such an end, she would almost agree to comply. 

At such a moment, her own 'now' flaking apart like dried paint left in the elements, her mission muddied and no longer the straight shoot it had once been, her life and safety in jeopardy, her brain and veins and nether regions pulsating to a frequency she did not even know existed, she felt as though she were being drawn and quartered; each limb and appendage pulled, stretched, ripped in a different direction. Concentration was a luxury to which she could no longer aspire. It became increasingly difficult to hold together even enough to maintain her place in time, her traction among the space she knew as, "now." 

. 

The dark browed man appeared beside the bed--the vision bed, swathed in a coat and hat, and in the darkness as though part of the darkness. His lips moved, and he bent close to her ear, her own reactions slowed as though under water. She felt the tickling itch of his beard on her cheek as she heard his voice for the first time. 

"An anchor, milady," he said, and she closed her eyes to see him better, to see him through the amulet of the Witchblade stone. But the Witchblade was having too much fun, and refused to show him to her in the light, to reveal him in any way through vision or portent. Or, perhaps the ancient talisman was having too much fun pulling her apart, and wanted no distraction from its game. 

_An anchor_, she said to herself, repeating his words. She kept her eyes closed, could still feel the close brush of him against her cheek. She was not alone. _Mabel_. She thought of her child, concentrated on what she knew to be true. She recalled Mabel's birth, her first haircut. The way she would pull her tiny self up by the leg of Bronte's baby grand piano long before she could walk on her own. Her child, with the eyes of the grandmother, the lips of the father, the teeth (Bronte hoped) of the uncle. 

She thought of Mabel, anchored herself with the child, a foothold, a handhold on sanity--on single layer reality--and by the time she again opened her eyes, the room was in Paris, the trunks and toiletries scattered about the room were Elizabeth Bronte's. She was Elizabeth Bronte again, whole, and as yet unshattered. 

To celebrate, she threw back the satin comforter she had been sleeping under, threw on a dressing gown, and found her way into the suite of rooms' second bedroom, where she climbed in with her fast asleep daughter. 

The rest of the night passed without dream or vision, the stone of the Witchblade bright as a nightlight, humming happily to itself from under Mabel's covers. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	22. Thoughts of Mabel

Elizabeth woke the next morning, knowing (without her daughter having even yet awakened) that Mabel wanted to go to the park. Which, on any other day, in any other city--at any other time--would have been a simple thing to do for her child. Yet, until she could cobble together some version of her next move--some spark of a plan, Elizabeth felt nervous about leaving the hotel, even setting foot outside her rooms. She was currently, for the most part, flying under the SS's radar. The presence of an officer in the building's lobby had not been lost on her, though. She and her child would be expected to be in mourning over their loss of _Leutnant_ Germer. That, with the added pressure of the unpaid bills, made her very sure that a low profile was their best course of action. 

Lying beside her sleeping daughter, she put her hand softly to Mabel's cheek and moved the child's light hair behind her ear. _Her anchor_. She smiled, somewhat sadly, she imagined. One day she hoped for something better for her child. A future with no Reich, no SS. No war. Some days, such an eventuality seemed nearly visible on the horizon. Others, it seemed lost, obscured among the horrors of the present. 

At four, she wondered if Mabel could even remember home--America, New York. She wanted to hope so, wanted to believe that the child could feel even a fraction of the love she felt for her country, her other life. 

It was probably impossible--and probably for the best. Mabel remembered England, though dimly--their small row house and garden. The dog they had left behind. Perhaps, her father. England was an essential part of their cover story. A story in which America did not exist. From lack of use the child's English (what little she had had before the move to Germany) had grown rough, her French (now in the learning stages) only a little better. Her German vocabulary growing so quickly it amazed even her mother. 

This child, her constant wonderment, the best and most terrifying thing in her life. She would be a hybrid child, a life composed of three separate worlds, even in her young age a party to deception; for Mabel knew of both the mission, and the Witchblade. Their life may have seemed an elaborate game to the child--a dress-up masquerade, but Bronte had never wished to hide the truth from her daughter, insofar as her young one could handle the truth, and keep it well-hidden herself. Thus far, she was proving adept at both objectives. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	23. A Knock

Bronte kissed Mabel's cheek, soft and warm, nuzzling into the spot behind the child's ear--a known ticklish region. "Rise and shine, Sleepyhead," she said. "We've got to order some breakfast." 

Mabel stretched, not speaking, and her tiny, inquisitive fingers found their way to her old friend, the Witchblade, cuffed onto her mother's right wrist. The fingers crept over and around the metal scrollwork, the talisman stone blinking different colors from the child's welcome touch. 

Bronte's lips were poised to ask the question of what they should ask be brought up when a loud, abrupt pounding rattled the front door of the suite, and the hinges upon which it hung. 

Still wearing her dressing gown from the night before, she did not even pause to retie it, but rushed to the door, her own fright causing the Witchblade to squeeze at her wrist, making the sensation of her racing pulse double in its intensity. 

She knew better than to stall by asking through the door whom it was. She put her right, Witchblade-ed hand behind her, feeling Mabel's head against her thigh, the child holding tightly to her, bracing for what was to come. 

She opened the door fully, seeing no reason to crack it only slightly, and found herself facing not the SS--nor even a German--but rather the concierge, looking a little nervous himself. 

"Madame Germer," he addressed her (she stiffened slightly at his addressing her as though she were Rolf's wife), "I apologize deeply for disturbing you so early." He wrung his hands. "These gentlemen," he referenced several burly men over his shoulders, "are most insistent that they deliver an item to you without delay." He furrowed his brow. "I had tried, most diligently, to alert you of their presence for several hours now." 

Bronte could imagine, from her prior interaction with the obsequious yet strangely harsh concierge, the muted knocking to which he referred. It was no wonder she had not heard his calls from where she had slept in Mabel's room. She apologized for inconveniencing him. "I'm very sorry," she said, Mabel still at her back. "As you can see I am not dressed to receive visitors." 

"Madame Germer," he used the title a second time, "they are _most_ insistent." 

She had no idea as to what the men could possibly have to deliver, and with Rolf there was no way of telling. In only her dressing gown she could not hope to hold them off forever, so she gave in. 

That was when she saw the piano bench, held in the arms of the first mover to enter her suite. A second man entered with a profusion of lilies. The third, a brass piano lamp. And finally, a load borne by four movers; the instrument itself, a beautiful upright, its elegance unshadowed by the moving blankets in which it had been swathed for protection. 

She thought she might throw up. 

To distract her stomach, she sneaked a glance at the concierge, noted as he studied the suite, as though looking to assure himself that over the last few days nothing had gone missing. He caught her watching him, and she all but felt his unspoken question: _when would Madame be planning to leave and settle the bill?_ The many, many bills of which he certainly could not be ignorant. And here, being settled into the sitting room area onto which the suite's foyer opened--yet another bill. Yet another opportunity for Rolf's generosity to become her downfall. 

She could not refuse the delivery. How could she? To announce to anyone that she was unable to cover this new expense was to arouse doubts as to her managing her other expenses, and not only did she not fancy sleeping on the street with Mabel (or worse, in a cell), she also rather fancied a hot breakfast, which, like all other meals they took, were charged to the room until such a time as she devised a way in which to settle the bill and leave Paris. 

"Before you go," she boldly addressed the snooping concierge, "would you be so good as have our breakfast sent up?" 

Listening to her order, the little man looked all shock and indigestion, as though he had tried to swallow a hard-boiled egg whole--and failed. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	24. Meetings and Introductions

With no trip to the park to plan (much to Mabel's chagrin), Bronte found some stationery and set to marking it with clefts--to her best recall scoring an exercise or two from _Hanon's_ for Mabel to practice. The gift of the piano had come without sheet music, as Rolf knew she required none. Or, perhaps that was to be another surprise later in the day, or the next day--the complete works of Schubert, or Strauss. 

They had met through Strauss. Yes, that was something he would remember. She had been a guest at a party, an invitation it had not be easy to secure. She had worn green. The ladies present were, by turns, asked to play. She played Strauss. Her performance was well received. Somewhere before the middle measures of the waltz, Rolf Germer and his wife arrived--late, as one of the children had been ill and he (the child) had been difficult to leave. 

Rolf had just been handing his hat to the servant (he would always say, when he told the story) when he heard the most delicate rendering of Strauss he had ever heard in his life. And when he had met the pianist possessing such skill? It was all he could do to kiss the only hands of such a performer, and not the feet as well. 

Of course, she remembered it differently. Certainly she had caught Rolf's eye that night. Of that there was no doubt, but he was a skillful man when it came to subterfuge, and rather than approach her openly (and in plain sight of his wife) he managed to be introduced to her quite casually through a mutual acquaintance. In retrospect, his response to both her--and her playing--was quite sanguine. She was pleased (though somewhat surprised--she had been trawling for smaller fish that night) to find among her letters less than a week later his invitation to a rather different sort of party. A party that boasted no wives, but many husbands. 

. 

Bronte found herself wondering momentarily about Frau Germer--whether she had yet heard the news of her husband's death. She tried to shake off such unproductive thoughts. 

To focus herself, once Mabel had finished her exercises, she took the place on the piano's bench, and let her fingers roam over the familiar keys, picking out remembered tunes and melodies, while centering her mind on the course which she should next set. 

. 

Carelessly, her mind wandered to the day Rolf had presented her with the Witchblade. At the time she had been horrified--unsure of what would have possessed a man as careful and as loyal to his Fuehrer as was Rolf Germer to steal from the man he was sworn to serve. Now, of course, she knew the answer to such a question: the Witchblade did it. 

Rolf had brought it home that night in his valise, wrapped in a half-burnt rotting cloth. The peasant chemise of Joan of Arc, he had said, and she had laughed--the moment seeming like the beginning of an elaborate practical joke. The Blade itself was in its armored incarnation, unwieldy, of incredible weight, and the most impractical thing to give one's mistress of which she could think. 

It was only from Rolf's insistent doggedness that she even agreed to put it on. He would not touch it himself. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	25. Solitude in G Minor

Bronte switched to Chopin, the piece like slow rain on a dreary day. Mabel sat with her back against the upright, down next to the pedals, playing with a set of carved animals that were part of a large crèche Bronte had given her for Christmas. 

The Witchblade had changed almost immediately that day, in front of both Rolf's and her eyes--retracting into the unrecognizable piece of jewelry she now wore constantly on her wrist. 

Bronte hummed along softly to the concerto she played. It was familiar, cozy--like an old friend. Her eyes wandered from the elaborate arrangement of lilies atop the piano to one of the two inset mirrors bookending where the sheet music would sit if she were to have any. The mirrors were tiny, barely large enough to reflect her entire face, yet the closer she looked as she played, the more deeply she could see into them--beyond her own reflection. 

_The cold fog of ice rose up all around her, the horsehair sofa on which she sat hard and unpleasant. She was cold enough to want to shiver, but unable to move. _

An ancient, elderly man in a wheelchair sat opposite her, and if she were not so chilled in this place, from his manner she would assume they were about to take afternoon tea. 

His right hand, scarred by a strange, upraised penumbra-like marking of dual spheres, shook at his side. His lips moved slowly, with great effort, but she could not hear what he was saying. She looked for the Witchblade--could not feel its presence on her wrist. It would know the answer. It would tell her what he said. 

The old man moved to her hand, and she saw--as though outside of herself--what was there. No Witchblade. Missing fingers. No fingers. 

No fingers. No hand. 

The brightly lit sitting room of the suite in Paris flooded her consciousness like a cold-water dowsing on a sleeping soldier. She had finished the last movement of the Chopin, her hands still holding their positions until the last sound died away, years of practice taking over while her brain and consciousness absented themselves elsewhere. 

She heard Mabel, trying out sounds for the donkey she played with--the sheep and camel. She looked down to her hands, the vision making her undecided about continuing to play or abandoning the instrument altogether. In the side mirror she caught her own reflection. She looked pale, shaken. Afraid of her own shadow. She brought her hands to her face, and startled, pulled them away. Several fingers on each hand had begun to slowly seep blood from under the cuticle, as though she had played with great force, and strength beyond her own ken. 

Bronte hurried to the bathroom before her blood stained the keyboard--or frightened Mabel. She was disturbed enough for both of them. And though the Witchblade did not tell her, it would be only hours before the next disturbing pounding would be heard at their door. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	26. Berlin is the Key

Three in the morning is a strange trick of the clock. It is not quite night, and yet, not quite day. A time for all but the most haunted to sleep. 

In her lavish suite, Elizabeth Bronte was sleeping soundly, her rest nothing at all like the prior night's tossing and turning, its visions and portents. She had lost almost three full days without managing to map out a course of action, and the sentient bracelet she wore--in which she had placed her trust--had given her nothing to go on, save fragmented visions that distracted more than aided. She had begun to think of the Witchblade as her last and only friend in Paris, but had found herself increasingly skeptical of its motives--its own hold on sanity. Whether it could not help, or, or simply refused to, she did not know. 

Rolf had once told her (as a type of old wives' tale or boogeyman story, she had assumed) that when it was most needed the Blade would abandon the wielder. This was what had happened to Joan, he said, his eyes round and wide in the dark, where they lay in bed, watching the bracelet on her wrist. She half expected him to shout, "boo!" to cap off such a ghost story. Had he done so, it would have been most uncharacteristic. 

She never had (and now never would) understood Rolf's designs on the Blade. He never asked anything of it, never spent much time questioning her about its nature--or any changes that it brought about in her. Did not know the number of men it had killed, riding on her wrist. The number of people whose lives it had saved. 

And Rolf Germer had died without ever knowing--ever having even the slightest inkling--that the gift he so proudly had his mistress wear was the single greatest code breaking device the Reich (or indeed, the World) had ever known. There was no language it did not understand, no radio frequency it could not intercept. 

Knowing how much good the Blade could do were her own safety was guaranteed, she had (shortly after her periculum) exchanged communication with her lone British Intelligence contact in Berlin to the effect that she must get back to Britain, from whence she could do the most good. Her request was denied. Without telling the truth about the Witchblade her demand had sounded foolish, as though she were giving in, or turning tail. She did not ask a second time. 

With the ability the Witchblade gave her, she grew to realize that she was not only a threat to Germany, but such power a potential threat to anyone--any country--that chose to see it in such a light. Scott and the boys back in London were looking--not for a single female code breaker--but the machine on which such codes were created, and the settings book that powered the heretofore unbreakable codification. 

Doubtless (she could not be sure as she had no contact with them), they were quite puzzled at the impeccable accuracy through which she was able to break any stray (coded) SS communications that came her way; whether found in a forgotten pocket of Rolf's coat, or laying carelessly atop his office desk when she would casually drop by to see if he would like some lunch. 

She had been sure the Witchblade enjoyed their mission, took pleasure in spoiling the Nazi's plans, subverting their designs on the world. Before going to bed that night she had spoken to it, lying inert on her arm, the stone again glassy and unemotive. 

"Paris is not for us," she had said sliding it up and down her forearm. "Berlin is where we belong. Berlin is the key." She should have felt foolish for addressing what seemed nothing more than an inanimate object. She did not. "I am going back to Berlin," she declared. "Nothing you do or show or make me experience will change that." For no particular reason, she switched to Latin, "if you like it here so much, you can stay." 

The talisman eye rippled in response, in what Bronte took to be the Witchblade equivalent of sticking out its tongue. She had gone to bed quickly after that, before she started trying to decipher what such a response might mean. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	27. Without a Fight

Heavy fists rocketed into the suite's outer door; hammered in the way Bronte knew SS officers liked to hammer right before breaking down same door. Assuming the time had come, she grabbed her wrap and rushed to meet the summons, whatever it held for her--the Witchblade, as always, on her arm. 

As she put her right hand to the latch, she felt the blade encase her arm from elbow to fingertip--healing her previously cut palm in its supernatural meld with her skin. 

The aftermath would be messy, and perhaps difficult to explain (assuming she hung around), but the Witchblade had agreed--whomever stood on the other side of the door had best have made their peace with what powers that may be, because the smell of punishment (and likely death) hung heavily in the air, like hazy humidity before a downpour. Elizabeth Bronte and the Witchblade would not be taken without a fight. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	28. Nothing is this important

But it was not the SS. It was no one to fear. They were not yet coming for her. Rather, it was the insistent fists of Connor O'Barragh she had heard. 

"Let me in," he demanded (though quietly), pushing the door open with the leverage of his weight. 

Quickly surveying the empty 3a.m. hallway to see if he were followed, Bronte closed the door behind him, her temper (and the Witchblade's) going from tepid to rolling boil in an instant. 

"What the devil do you think you're doing here?" she asked, her own voice a harsh, angry whisper, as Mabel was asleep in her room down the short hall. 

Connor stood against the wall just to the side of the door, his shoulders uneven, his posture defeated. "Tell me why I canna stop thinking about you," he asked in his native tongue. 

"They could be having me watched!" she chid him, her voice tinged with anger, as his visit put her further in jeopardy. She anticipated a few unpleasant words and then felt sure he would leave. "Nothing is this important," she spat out. "What of the officer in the lobby?" 

"The one watching you?" He shrugged, his coat looking much worse for wear than it had even scant days ago. "I've killed men for less," he told her, and she knew it was true, as well as she knew the officer in the lobby was dead at his hand. 

Connor moved to her side, his listing bulk intimidating in the moonlight. 

"What are you? Drunk?" she asked, though he exhibited no signs of intoxication--only exhaustion. 

His eyes would not leave her face. He had not even noticed the shine of the Witchblade's metal on her arm. "Tell me," he did not blink. "Tell me who you are." 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	29. I'm no one

"I'm no one," Elizabeth protested. She did not want him here. She had enough to think about without adding him back to the mental list from which she had so recently scratched his name. "No one, just some girl who fell on hard times, and got caught up with the wrong crowd." Her voice nearly broke. "That's all," she tried to be convincing. "No one." Her fist flexed within the Blade's gauntlet. 

_Why did he have to show up again? Why couldn't he just let be?_ His presence did nothing to calm her, only served to heighten her senses by adding the burden of yet another person to protect. Her nerves and temples flared with danger. She thought what she felt was anger; was surprised to find herself on the brink of tears. 

"Shhh. No more lies," he said, his pupils dilated in the darkness. "We've both of us had enough of that. Only truth, now." 

"I'm no one," her voice caught in her throat, ruining her attempt to be gruff. She restrained a shiver before it manifested itself. "My name is Bronte. Elizabeth Bronte. My only living child--my daughter, Mabel--is asleep in the next room." Her arm, Witchblade encasing it, came up involuntarily to point the way down the hall. The metal shone and flickered in the moonlit foyer, as if tickled to add itself to the growing catalog of inexplicables this man could list as attached to her life. 

"Deception made us as we are," she said, unsure if the, 'we' were the Witchblade and herself, or Connor, or Mabel. Time and identity seemed ready to bleed into one another. "That is all the truth I can tell you," she warned him. "After that? After that is lies." 

The atmosphere in the room shifted. The charge of only moments ago mellowed out, forgotten. With her declaration, Bronte moved back to the door, thinking to open it and tell him to go. She had gotten her way from him by a simple, inspiring flash of the gauntlet before--she saw no reason that this situation should differ. In reaching for the door, she had to take a step toward where he stood in the half-darkness, his back nearly against the wall. 

As she moved, she felt his hand's touch on the side and back of her neck--and not in an aggressive manner; his fingers and grip kneading into her skin like they required a hold on something more solid than the air about him--which looked unlikely to hold him upright for much longer. 

Still, she responded as though he had attacked. The Witchblade moved her forearm laterally against his chest, pinning him to the wall with a dull thud. 

"I haven't killed anyone lately," she cautioned him, his fingers still encroaching on her hairline, the touch of his palm cold to her, as foreign as corpse flesh. 

His left hand slowly retracted, and she saw small beads of sweat forming at his hairline. His eyes now faraway, their vision distant, he withdrew his hand, resting it on top the elbow joint of the Witchblade still settled across his chest. 

"How can a hunk of metal and stone be jealous?" he asked, patting the talisman like an old friend--or worthy nemesis. The whisper of a smile crossed his face, creasing the lines around his mouth, and Bronte was nearly too distracted by his expression to feel when his knees began to buckle. 

At the last minute she grabbed him by the shoulders, hoping to hold him in place. 

_There was no time for this--he had to go now_, she thought. "You have to go now," she said, foolishly--there was nothing in his manner that showed he could make it back down the hallway, much less make it away from this place without fainting dead away. And she couldn't very well have that. 

"Go," he asked, hazily. "But I already went once, Lass--was that not enough for ya?" 

"Where did you go," she asked. "Where have you been, that you could not even take off your shirt and this damned sponge of a sweater to get yourself dry? Had you no thought to taking a chill?" 

"I went back," he said, as he slumped slowly down the wall and to the floor, where she held him upright, the Blade retracting in the wake of his collapse, becoming no more than an ornament for her wrist. 

"Back to _La Belle Aurore_," he told her. "Been there for two days solid. Giving you the chance to sell me out." Even in his present condition, he had the obstinacy to wink. "That settled, I came to find you--and the wee Mabel." 

"And here I am," Bronte said, knowing she was stuck with him. Knowing she would not send him back out into the night with his chill, with his still-damp sweater and shirt, no matter the ignorance of his actions--returning to the only spot she could have directed the SS to, had she chosen (or had they interrogated her fiercely enough). 

He was a fool, waiting in that dangerous way station, the entrance to at least one run of tunnels that could lead the Nazis--if not to the cellar where he had taken her, then, likely to another equally secret Free French hideout. She shook her head in disbelief at the imprudence of his tenacity to disprove her traitor status. _Wrongheaded mama's boy_. Look at where his actions had gotten him; nearly unconscious on the floor of a known collaborator's hotel suite, soaked through with a chill that might turn on him, if the Gestapo did not stop by to investigate where their man in the lobby had got himself to, first. 

Bronte began peeling his sweater off over his head, his arms so heavy with exhaustion, so unwieldy in the process, she thought for a moment she would slice the awkwardly wet knitted wool to get it off him, instead. 

"And here you are," the foolish man called Jean said, in belated answer to her, before he swooned away altogether. He did not seem to mind the precariousness of his current circumstances in the least. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com/shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	30. Rest

As she got his wet clothes off, and tucked him beneath the sheets--with only occasional help from him--Bronte was pleased to note that he did not seem to be feverish, only bone-deep chilled and exhausted. She made a plan to let him sleep until just after dawn. She would keep watch until that time, after which she would wake him and ensure he left--permanently. 

Elizabeth passed the first hour in one of the formal chairs in the suite's foyer, receiving, for her troubles, a stiff back and cricked neck, and the recognition that she seemed unable to not see Connor behind her eyes even when she was not occupying the same room with him. 

As the second hour crept into sight, she went and checked on Mabel, sleeping soundly--no indication that anything that had passed had woken her. 

As a doctor makes late night rounds at a hospital, Bronte returned to her own bedroom and stood over the shirtless man swathed in the satin coverlet, his sweater and shirt lying directly on the nearby radiator. The man called Jean slept on his stomach, facedown in the overabundance of pillows on her bed. 

_Rolf's bed, really_, she thought, the red swastika armband of her dead lover's uniform catching her attention out of the corner of her eye. 

She walked around to the other side of the bed--Rolf's side. What was it her father used to say after a long day out in the sun, building bridges? That he was as 'tired as playing seven one-night stands?' It encapsulated how she felt exactly, her brain having run in endless circles since she'd set eyes on this man. 

She found she no longer had the strength for it, and instead of the anger she had felt upon his arrival, she now only felt an inspecific relief that she could not logically justify. A washing away of immediate concern, like the murkiness of a slow-acting tranquilizer--or several shots of good whiskey. Warmth spread over her from the inside out, and with it her muscles unknotted, her joints unclenched. The hyper-alert lines around her eyes smoothed with unexpected relief--like a loosening of tightly strung laces in a corset, or on a pair of Sonja Henie booted ice skates she had bought herself before the war. 

Elizabeth Bronte had only intended to sit for a moment on the edge of the bed before finding somewhere better suited to pass the time until dawn, but without thought, in the uncluttered fog she found her thoughts moving in, she slid over, onto the bed, and lay her left cheek against Connor's bare shoulder, his skin growing warmer and more alive with each passing moment. Her eyes looked across his back to his perfect right shoulder blade. With the measured rise and fall of his back, her breaths began to echo his own, like a subtle duet. Coupled thus, with a man about whom she knew as little as did he her, the wielder of the Witchblade lost herself to sleep. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com/shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	31. Too Far

_A harsh German voice aggressively imposed itself over the vision, like a narrator in a newsreel, reciting coordinates and numbers of troop movements, casualty counts--endless numbers in clipped, efficient Deutsch. _

The Priest from Jean's Free French cellar, surrounded by the paintings, littered about him like grave markers. He held three books, clutched them to himself as a mother might hold a child. "Time, like an hourglass," he said. "A finite number of grains of sand--" 

The Nazi army transmission overlapped, like a bad film dubbing. 

_"--each time the glass is turned," _

Troop orders we being given, commissions granted to those leaving for the Russian front. 

_"--the grains fall, re-assembling in a different configuration, touching other grains--passing through the narrow neck of the glass at different intervals." _

Parisian train arrivals and departures, cargos. Information on the train that would carry the bodies from the New Year's bombing home to Berlin. 

_"Different arrangements, different connections," the Priest said, "but always, always the same grains of sand." _

Lists of supplies, amounts and types, needed at the front. 

_A school assembly hall. "First place in blank verse goes to...Gabriel Bowman," spoke an overly stout female announcer. "For the poem, 'Forever, and Eternally Fated.'" _

Updates on bombing runs to England. 

_"And what do you think of that, Mrs. Bowman?" the man next to her reached over and squeezed her hand. She squeezed his in return, unable to hold back a proud mother's smile. _

The man's appearance changed. Altered until it became the man who shared her mark--his on the top of his right hand, large and upraised. "I want your pretty bracelet," he said, in perfectly accented Castilian, and as he smiled his teeth became razorblades. His hand reached and pulled aside her blouse's placket, revealing a similar mark on the rise of her breast. 

Detailed casualty counts. 

_She moved back and away from him, but his smile grew larger, more threatening, his preternaturally white hair snaking into albino scorpion tails, striking at her like a medusa. The penumbra circles of her own mark--Elizabeth Bronte's mark--located on the crest of her left hip throbbed, itching like the worst chicken pock she had ever known. _

As she tried to scream, to translate the blinding heat of her scorched hip into sound, the visionscape twisted, the alteration like the changing of a radio station. Static one minute--the next, a clear signal. 

The coded Nazi transmission fell silent. 

A few gutting candles cast dim shadows on primitive stone walls. She lay in passion's bed beneath skins and furs, their smooth, sueded undersides bare against her own flesh. Against his own flesh. Connor, but not Connor. And she herself, but not herself. 

"I curse the stars," she said to his sleeping form, whispering into his ear. "They take you away from my side." Her eyes drifted along his back over to the long sword propped beside the bed--waiting. She wished him to wake, and as she kissed his closed eyes, another portent shift. As one, they rolled and tumbled, giggling like lovers sharing a joke they would not remember the next morning. 

She was so happy. His face crinkled as though it would rend itself from pleasure, want and contentment oddly married within his steady gaze. 

"Me with a cop," he said--and she stopped him with a kiss. And another. And another. And the blissful delight that she felt--that being with him gave her--nearly overcame the blistering sensation on her hip, like molten lead--volcanic lava--burning into her flesh. With her hand she moved his to the spot, tearing at the cloth that covered it. Still, not cool enough. 

She had to stop the burning. Something told her that he was the only one that could. He allowed her to guide his mouth down her side, to the rise of her bare hip--a stop at each rib to pay it homage with a kiss--until his mouth found the mark, and she urged him to cool it with his breath, like the blowing out of a match's flame. Her back curved upward with the exclamation of it. Now, she thought, now. 

As his tongue savored the spot, so inflamed it must have tasted of salt and brimstone, Bronte's vision receded, and she knew that, it was indeed the now, her now--and what was done was far too far along to be stopped--and herself far too involved to wish it be so. 

A very different kind of fog--one free of portents and visions--began to coalesce about her. She welcomed the fog, did not attempt to slow her rapid breaths, her instinctual reactions to his touches that at once seemed so new, and yet so familiar. She locked her fingers in the close-cropped hair of the man called Jean, and willingly lost herself to it. 

. 

It was shortly after dawn on January fourth, and she had less than thirty-six hours in which to leave Paris. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com/shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	32. Last night's vision

It was seven or eight when she woke, the cast of light into the room through the drapes her only guide. He was sleeping still, and she rolled to face him. 

He was again on his stomach. In the early morning's many tussles he had divested the mattress of nearly all its pillows, and he slept without one now, his cheek to the sheet, his mouth slightly open, his jaw slack. Looking at him did her no good, resolved nothing, yet it felt like the right thing to do. 

Bronte knew she was leaving the city--did not know how as of yet, but such knowledge made her jealous of this time with him--as jealous as the other her in last night's vision--the her jealous that the version of him was leaving. 

_Last night's vision_. She nearly started, jostling the bed--and its other occupant. The Nazi broadcast--she had nearly forgotten about it in the wake of what had followed. If she did not concentrate to devote its contents well to memory they would fade, and be of no use to anyone--and she meant to make much use of them once she returned to Berlin and re-connected with her British contact. Memorizing them was of paramount importance. 

Not wishing to wake him, she did not rise, only rolled onto her back (taking breaks every now and then to steal another look at him), cataloging the information and committing it to memory in the way she had at one time cribbed for exams. Oddly enough, the Witchblade even agreed to be helpful in the task. It was not long before she felt as confident of her recall of the intelligence as she had of her Catechism that first Communion those many years ago. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com/shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	33. People Should Knock

Bronte must have fallen back to sleep again--it was the only possible explanation for the fact that she woke a second time that morning--or rather, that afternoon. 

Voices in the other room drifted in to where she lay, and at one point she briefly heard Mabel at her _Hanon's_ on the piano. She could smell the leftover warmth of the hot lunch she knew Mabel was able to order for herself when the concierge rang to get their day's needs. 

It was strange that she could not even remember the phone ringing, or knocks to the suite's front door when the meal would have arrived. It was stranger still that Mabel had not come to find her. Which could only mean that Connor must not have left--must still be trapped in the suite, either by desire, or by further extenuating circumstances. At least she counted him clever enough to keep his head down and make himself scarce should any hotel staff appear. 

_Connor, still here_. It made an unpleasant, awkward sort of sense. After all, one couldn't make a very effective break for it in broad daylight. He would no doubt, of necessity, be on her hands until at least dark--possibly well after. 

His presence was not an entirely unpleasant thought, but she found that she felt overly modest in the wake of it, and did not wish to present herself in only her wrapper. She slid out from under the covers and moved to dress. 

She discovered more than a few marks of hands and lips decorating the skin of her abdomen, her thighs. A moment's blush, and a bawdy giggle from the Witchblade reminded her that he would look no less decorated today. 

She was experiencing such a strange cocktail of emotions as she pulled on a silk pair of tap pants and a lace-accented chemisette, moving to her lingerie drawer for a garter belt and nylons. Being Rolf's mistress had been about his pleasure--not hers. It had been about her mission, which could only have hoped to succeed by keeping him happy, interested, and satisfied in their relationship. Which was not to say that she had been unhappy with their arrangement--only that it had been a longer time than she cared to admit since she had felt like an equal part in lovemaking--or any other aspect of adult pleasure. She had nearly forgotten how intoxicating it could be. As a result, last night's heated coupling left her feeling discomfited and a bit off balance--like walking around in only one high heel. 

The door to the bedroom opened a slit, then a bit more. Her head shot up from where it had been bent to its task, and her first thought--very foolishly--was to her hair, which had many hours ago fallen out of the crocheted hairnet into which it had been painstakingly set for the night. 

It was Connor. She could feel herself beginning to flush. 

"You don't know, do you," he asked, cutting through any awkward preamble about the early morning they had spent together among the sheets. He was wearing a non-descript white dress shirt of Rolf's. 

She didn't answer, but felt the concentration of his gaze on her--in nothing but her underpinnings, and not even all of those. She pulled her chin up, the beginning of that flush at the sight of him fading into memory. People should knock before entering a room--even if entering a room in which certain--intimacies--had occurred only hours prior. 

"You don't know who you are," he finished his question, meeting up with her by the bureau. 

"I already told you," she began, her mood ready to turn. She did not want to go through this again. 

"You're Elizabeth Bronte," he quoted her. "Yes, I know--but beyond that, what?" His eyebrows arched in question. "Do you know what _this_ is?" He motioned from her breastbone to his, mimicking a connection. "What this is?" he moved to (and she let him, though stiffly) smooth her cheek with one of his hands. The touch of skin to bare skin was like the attraction of electrical current to copper. 

"What this is?" he asked now, his hand snaking around the back of her neck and drawing her lips toward his in a deep kiss. 

_She was standing over an ancient book, reading a story to herself in a long-dead tongue. Rather, the Witchblade was reading it for her. When she looked up from the pages the white-haired man from last night's vision stood over her. _

She wanted to know where the rest was, wanted to finish the story. "The death of Conchobar," the man said, looking dutifully saddened. He would not give her the pages she wanted. 

His eyes looked away from the book and into another corner of the sparse room. 

"How does it end?" she asked, ready to beg him if she had to. 

He responded by walking toward the corner that held his gaze. Like a spotlight tracking an actor on a stage, once he arrived at the corner she could see--indisputably--what it held. 

Connor lay feebly propped up against the wall, his dark green shirt staining with blood as his life was leaving him. 

"I don't know," the white-haired man said, squatting down beside Connor. "This cut looks fresh to me." His marked hand pulled aside Connor's shirt to display the gorge in his no-longer beating breast. 

Though she could not see the white-haired man's face, she felt his lips spread broadly into a smile of pleasure, as though he had won a card game through a particularly cunning trick. 

Bronte didn't even gasp her way out of the portent. She came back to herself, still embraced by Connor in the suite in Paris, and only leaned into the kiss more in an effort to forget the vision as quickly as possible--irresponsibly choosing to blot out the chilling emotions the Witchblade had shown her with the sensations this man inspired in her--every bit as real to her as the talisman's oft times cruel premonitions. 

After a moment Connor pulled away and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, only a foot or two away from her. The air between them seemed heavy, viscous with something she could not see, could only feel. 

He closed his eyes, took her left hand in his two and bent over them as if in prayer. "Can you tell me why one look at you makes me want to scream and kill and weep and wed ye? Can you tell me why less than two-minutes' time with you outside that theatre had me dragging you to safety, when I was but to leave you there? What are you to me?" he asked, a melancholic desperation in his voice. "Do you know?" 

"I don't know," she confessed, her voice going on though her better judgment told her to leave it there. "I don't know--but I see things." 

"You're like the bleeding Genesis tree," he told her. "I didn't know you existed, wasn't aware of needing you--nor anyone else--and then, here you are. And here I am, beyond hunger, beyond thirst or the need for shelter. Some craving I've got that never made an appearance before. One bite of you and I've fallen into something I know nothing of, and I can't decide to be delirious and celebrate, or cut my arm off in hopes the pain will regain me my concentration." He cocked his head to look up at her where she stood, water welling up in his eye, the contortion of confusion about his mouth. "And angels and ministers of grace defend me if I didn't see things last night, too." 

"I know," she agreed, squeezing his two strong hands embracing her single slim one. She moved his head to rest against her abdomen, comforting him like a child. 

_What could she tell him that would make sense of it, when it made so little speakable sense to her? She knew only that she felt it. The Witchblade had shown her the power of acceptance, the freedom that could come from instinct. They had not been easy lessons to learn._

She brushed her hand through his hair. "I know." _The Witchblade was hard enough to handle for a Wielder. She could not imagine how cruel and overpowering it would seem to an outsider._

His arms reached up to embrace her, he had nothing more to say. His questions were answerable only in the reaffirmation that a connection between them did exist, beyond their waking memory, beyond (Bronte knew) their current place in time. 

She stroked his ear, down to his jawline, with her right hand. The edge of the amulet stone touched his skin. 

_A besieged castle's keep. "Witch!" a man in battle-scarred armor cried, riding before a makeshift litter. She stepped forward. _

"An ambush," the man told her, his beard flecked with blood and flesh he had cut that day. "May the king live forever, he will not see the dawn." 

The litter now passed by as strong men bore it into the great hall. Under animal skins lay a man so broken, so taken apart by the sword it was all she could do to recognize him as Connor. 

"The llan," the dying figure moaned, his voice little more than shallow breath. "You must not give it him. It is all he wants, and then he will kill us to the last child so that our honor will die with us." 

She leaned in to hear the last, the smell of bile heavy on his labored breath. 

Bronte started, like a child found in hide-and-seek, and at her movement Connor's left hand withdrew from her upper right arm. 

She saw (as did he) his fingers, wet with blood from a wound like a bullet graze now blooming impossibly on her bicep. A wound that Elizabeth Bronte had surely not incurred. 

"What have you seen," he implored her (intuiting that she had experienced a vision), the wonder and disbelief at what _he_ saw rising in his voice. 

"Nothing," she assured him, knowing there was no way to explain the stigmata-like happening (not even to herself), no way to make sense of the images and emotion in a vision that made so little sense to her. "Nothing about you," she lied, trying very hard to prevent the Witchblade from reminding her of the prophetic divot mark in his chest. Tried not to recall the horrifying vision of the Witchblade sinking repeatedly into him, taking his life while on the arm of another woman. She refused to forecast what such a vision might mean, or how the talisman had found its way to another's wrist. 

Instead, she grabbed him more tightly, until his pulse rang reassuringly in her own ears, thump-thumping against her own skin. 

She could not explain what was between them, could only accept that it was, like something from Jung's collective unconscious, there. And, as of that moment, something she knew with all certainty that she was not prepared to lose. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com/shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	34. Angels and Milk

When Bronte had finished dressing and came out to join them, Connor and Mabel were bent over the dining table, intently involved in the prior day's newspaper. She crossed the sitting area to the table and pulled out a chair for herself, reaching for the tray of lunch (a tureen of soup and some bread) that had been brought up for them. There was not much left under the tureen's lid, but that's what harboring a secret third in your hotel suite got you: meals for two divided three ways. Thankfully, it would not be long until the evening meal. 

As she selected a spoon and bowl from the two already used beside the tray, Connor's head came up from his work, and Mabel's eyes followed his as he blushed slightly, his eyebrows pulling together in apology for his appetite. 

"I'm sorry," he began, "I hadn't--that is," he stumbled over the words. 

"It's nothing," Elizabeth smiled at him in an effort to be gracious. "I'm not even hungry, really." 

_What was wrong with her? He had as good as told her that he hadn't eaten for two days solid._

The smell of the stew was pungent as she ladled it into a bowl. Hasenpfeffer. There was no telling the last time Connor had even had meat. The fact that this much remained was a testimony in and of itself to his restraint. She reached for the bread, feeling somewhat chastened. 

Still on the tray she found the small crock of milk that was meant for Mabel still half-full. "May," she began in her best mother tone, and Mabel responded by turning from where she watched Connor and crinkling her face. 

"Mabel does not like milk," Bronte said to Connor, who looked up from his work at the other end of the table. 

"What a perfect child to have during an occupation, don't you think?" She beckoned to her daughter. "No interest in something so difficult to find in the city, so costly--and so important to keep her strong, and make her grow fat--like Frau Beinder," she said, her voice teasing. "It's a true blessing." 

"I gave it to the angel," said Mabel, pretending innocence, coming down to her mother's end of the table to accept the milk and drink it down, though begrudgingly. 

"And I wouldn't have it," Connor protested, his eyes on the paper before him. "Saints and angels don't need milk, I told her." He glanced up to show Bronte the twinkle in his eye. 

As her daughter bent over the cup, Bronte noticed that Mabel's hair was in a tidy braid--something the four-year-old could not have done on her own. "What's this?" she asked. 

"The wee one was looking a bit of a fright this morning, don't you know," Connor began, shrugging, "though she did a right-good job of dressing herself." 

"And you--" Bronte asked, one eyebrow flicking upward in disbelief. 

"I've got myself five sisters," he answered, his mouth turning into a familiar crooked smile. "Even a poor excuse for a Fenian's bound to learn something from that." 

Before Bronte could express her surprise at his hidden talents, Mabel finished gulping the last of her milk and presented her face for wiping. 

"He's making me a picture," the child said, happily. "He's a good draw-er, Mama." 

Connor finished his work with a flourish. "There you go, little one," he told Mabel, who rushed to the end of the table to accept her gift. She smiled broadly at his work, done with a piece of charcoal onto yesterday's Nazi-sanctioned newspaper. 

Mabel brought the page so that Elizabeth could look at it. The paper itself, as she too well knew--was filled with slanted articles, standard political propaganda, vicious and unscientific scientific reports about the inferiority of the Jewish race, and lists of the recent glorious Nazi dead. Imposed over this was Connor's drawing; a line sketch of herself--right down to the mole on her left cheek--but, as in the visions, it was not her. 

She was dressed in an unfamiliar uniform for no army or country or regiment of which British Intelligence had taught her, standing next to a man, half-hugging a man--the Asian man from the alley, and the long flight through the tunnel. They each wore expressions of happiness and pride, and it was easy to see they were friends, possibly something more. 

Something about the drawing made her very sad. She felt a twinge that she could not justify in the back of her throat. To counter that, she spoke, "so you weren't lying then, about being a painter. You draw a good hand." She tried a small smile. 

"Oh, I don't know about that," he sloughed off the comment. "But, sometimes," he said, not blinking as he looked at her, "sometimes I see things." His tone was more than a little like a challenge. He tapped the nub of charcoal he had used for the drawing against the table top. 

"May," Bronte called to her daughter in order to diffuse the moment's tension, handing her back the newspaper drawing. "You must think of a way to thank Herr Angel for his pretty gift." 

Mabel chewed her lip for a moment, then gathered up her dolls from where they had been laying, forgotten at the foot of her chair. Bronte thought her daughter was going to move to the piano. Rolf had always been so good at encouraging the child's playing, and Bronte thought her she would decide to play one of the simple pieces she knew as her thanks. 

Instead, Mabel took the first doll--a soft cloth and sawdust doll whose embroidered face was showing much wear--and handed it to Connor. 

"This is Audra," the little girl said, "Audra is from--" her voice stopped, struggling to remember the English word. "Audra is from Manchester. That's in Britain." She motioned that he was to set the doll on his lap. 

She lifted the other doll into view. "This is Madame Boucher. She just came to live with us at Christmas." For a moment she broke with the introductions and explained; "sometimes she can be very cross." 

Connor accepted the second doll, exquisitely made of porcelain, and dressed in soft silk finery, and placed it on his other knee, as instructed. 

Bronte, curious as to where this was going--whether it would be a school lesson, music recital, or magic show, finished the last of the hasenpfeffer and waited. 

"A long, long time ago," Mabel began, taking on a voice that Bronte knew only too well was meant to mimic her own, "there was a family of three children..." 

Her mother smiled. It was to be a story, then. _Their story._

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com/shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	35. Their Story

Elizabeth did not know how long she had been telling her daughter the story that had no name, but as she saw her child now, telling it to Connor, eyes going wide in all the right places, her arms and hands making the motions Elizabeth knew that she, herself, did with each telling, she felt a strange sense of joy, and found herself mouthing the words along with Mabel. 

_A long, long time ago there was a family of three children; a boy, named Cain, a girl named Carain, and a younger sister named Catain. Their mother's name was Lilit, and many, many years ago, while walking in a garden, Lilit had found a great treasure--her only treasure, and her only inheritance to bestow to her children: a wise, amber-colored stone. _

When Lilit became very old, she called her children to her, wishing to share her many secrets and knowledge with them--but the two eldest could only argue over who would receive the stone upon her death. Finally, Lilit knew that she would have to decide for them, as their hearts were too full of greed and wickedness to pay her wisdom any heed. 

"I should have the stone," said Cain. "I am the oldest--and the only son. The stone surely belongs to me!" 

"No," spoke Carain. "I am the most-beautiful, and the worthiest daughter. The stone belongs where it can be worshipped and adored, as am I." 

"And you, my youngest?" Lilit asked Catain. 

"I don't know who should receive the stone," Catain answered honestly. "There is much about the world I do not understand, and I hope before you die and are taken to the land of your mothers you may learn me more of it. Perhaps, then I can judge correctly." 

Listening intently to their sister, and fearing their mother would die before pronouncing an inheritor of the precious stone, both Cain and Carain leapt towards her death bed, snatching at the stone in her metal coronet, but it would not come loose. 

"Stop," Lilit cried, marshalling her strength to put them off, the stone lighting--fire dancing within it, as its power threw Cain and Carain away from the bed. 

"You, Cain," their mother cried, "as you are the eldest, and so pleased to be so--be so from this day forward. And by this stone's burn on your hand be known to all that you shall not die--though all about which you care will pass away from you, and neither you--nor none of man's kind--will wield the power of the stone which you so dearly seek." 

"Carain," she continued, addressing her eldest daughter whose once-perfect face was now burned from her encounter with the stone. "Most-beautiful no longer, adieu worship and adoration. Your greed has shown your true worth. You fear death and age. Within a season both will find and claim you." 

"Catain," Lilit's eyes rested on her youngest daughter. "You, my child, are the strongest of my children. You have been made so by their hate and deception, and the cruel lessons which, through your life, they have taught you. Because the stone-bearer must have strength to endure, and strength of mind to suffer its portentous visions, I must choose you. And because you have asked for wisdom when no other sought it--as I have no time to bestow it on you now as I must in haste to the land of my mothers--I gift you this (though it may seem a curse in days to come): be always born, and forever reborn; for life is the only way to catch wisdom, and death the only way in which to prove truth." 

And so Lilit died, and the stone in her coronet--that stone she found in a garden more long ago than the memory of the oldest person of the tribe could recall--came to be that of her youngest daughter's, Catain, also called Wisdom-catcher. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com/shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	36. Where is the prince?

When Mabel was done, Connor put his hands together to applaud her recitation. "Ah," he smiled, handing her Audra. "An ancient tale, and a tragic one. Like all things Irish." 

Mabel gave a pretty curtsey. 

"How did you come to know this story?" Connor asked. 

Mabel looked to Bronte, and his eyes followed. 

"Where did you hear it," he re-addressed the question to Elizabeth. 

"Nowhere," she answered truthfully. "It's just a story I know." 

"Well, then," he asked, unconvinced, "do you know how it ends?" 

"It doesn't end," she said, raising her shoulders in a shrug. 

"What do you mean, doesn't end?" The lines around his eyes were creased with incredulousness. "Of course it ends. All fairy tales end when the prince comes." He leaned in to Mabel, handing her Madame Boucher. 

"Surely your ma has told you about the prince." 

"What prince?" Mabel asked, stowing Madame Boucher under the arm that held Audra. "There's no prince," 

"No prince?" He might as well have been told there was no Paris, or no sky. 

"There is no prince," Bronte confirmed with a shake of her head. 

"But of course there's a prince," his eyebrows drew together in disbelief, like those of a child being told Father Christmas did not exist. "My mother told me the story from the time I was a wee babe meself. The Sea-God's daughter, Catain, lived in Connemara, and when crown prince Conchobar ascends the throne she agrees to lead his army. They say if a worthy offering is made, and Catain can be resurrected, she'll unite all Celts and lead them to their rightful glory. Now that's any Fenian's dream, there," he cracked a smile. "Catain's sister's named Deirdre, though, not Carain." He nodded his head. "The rest of it's pretty much spot-on, but how can you say there's no prince?" 

"It's my story," Bronte re-asserted, impatiently shifting the bowls, glasses and silver on the lunch tray, "and there is no prince." 

"You hear a story once--so long ago you don't even recall where you heard it--and you know it by heart? Feh," he said, "there's sure enough a prince. What a sad, lonely way to end a story; Catain wandering about, orphaned, grieving for her mother." 

"Mabel," Bronte said, feeling her hackles rise at his insistence. "It's time you had a nap before our supper." She took the child, who had collected her dolls, and exited the room. 

"Is there a prince, Mama?" Mabel asked, concerned. "Have we forgotten the prince?" 

"Bed, now." said Bronte, removing her child's dress so that she could nap more comfortably in her cotton slip. She tucked in Audra to one side of Mabel, and Madame Boucher to the other. "It's our story, isn't it May? We know best how to tell it." 

"Will the angel be here when I wake up?" Mabel asked, her eyes hopeful at again seeing her new friend and patron. 

"I don't know," Bronte told her, turning out the light and leaving the room in late afternoon sun. "Angels can be tricky." 

She kissed her daughter's forehead and walked reluctantly to the bedroom's door, not at all eager to return to her uninvited guest. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	37. A Cross Examination

The air of the sitting room/foyer seemed permeated with the fallout of the lack of a prince in the story. Save the bedrooms, though, there was no place else to be, and as she did not wish to encounter Connor in close proximity to another bed, Bronte returned to sit out the time before dark. Long moments passed in silence. 

"Bronte," he said, finally, trying to make conversation. "Sounds a bit like '_Brunty_,' a good Irish name." 

"It's Greek," she said, succinctly, "it means thunder." 

"So you're Greek, then?" 

"It's my husband's name," she said, flatly. 

His head jerked just an inch or so, as though someone had dropped a pin into a crystal glass and he could only just hear the tinkling. "And what does he think of all this?" 

"He's dead," she said. She'd said it a thousand times, easily, since her arrival on the Continent, since her first conversation away from home. But somehow, saying it to Connor was different. 

She thought about offering him her standard widow cover story, about how Jack had taken a chill and been carried off--after all, that's how Germans believed Brits died, right? From gout and chills, and maybe cholera. Something that rendered their perceived impotence more so, something weak and pitiable. Something about which the Germans, who thought themselves as a nation robust--and superior--could gloat. Sons of Britain didn't die valiantly fighting for all they were worth, launching themselves, along with brother RAF pilots, into the German-dominated night sky to stop the Blitz--win the war. _No, Deutschland_, she thought, _they were all milksops. Down to the last man_. 

_But not Jack--not her Jack, the real Jack. No, not Jack_. But she didn't tell Connor either story; not the lie nor the truth. They had promised no lies, and the truth--for all that she felt the familiar compulsion to share it--did no favors to those in their line of work. Instead, "I am alone," she said, "with my child." 

"But how can you have her a part of this?" Connor asked, as any sane person might--as anyone who knew even a quarter of the way the Nazi world worked--might. 

"How can I have her away from her mother? Her only parent?" she asked, his question as absurd to her as British mothers who shipped their children by the trainload off to Scotland, as though the English countryside could never be invaded, as though it were impervious to future atrocity. "I cannot protect her if she is not with me," Bronte said. "Nothing about the world can now be guaranteed, no safety assured--_anywhere_." 

"But to have her growing up around this--around--what you do--" he was getting dangerously close to being thrown out of her suite, and nightfall not yet arrived. 

"What I _do_," she said, "is none of _your_ business." She knew he wanted an explanation, wanted her to tell him everything, to expose herself in a more intimate way than she already had. But she would not do it. 

She had realized, even before the Witchblade had entered her life, that as a snapshot the life of Elizabeth Bronte would make no sense, would seem to be filled with lies and bad decisions and improper loyalties. She knew this, but she lived for the larger picture, the mosaic; which up-close seemed shattered, fragmented and incomprehensible, but which, from a great distance, coalesced into something decipherable to the human eye. She did not yet know the amount of distance that would someday be necessary in order to correctly view her actions and choices in the spirit and under the pressures in which they had been made. 

She had given up her life what seemed so long ago now, just as Mabel was a little baby, so that her child would have a New York City, a Paris, a London. So that her child would have a good world in which to live. The lengths to which she would have to go to accomplish this had not been apparent to her at the time. She knew more now, of the things she would be made to abandon, the dark places to which she would be required to journey. She would've liked to think she knew all such places, but the Witchblade would often teach her it was not so. 

She was not used to defending her life: she could number on only three fingers those who knew the truth of it. And their concern was less for herself--or for Mabel--than for the exquisite perfection of the cover story a widow traveling with a young child could provide an agent, and how far such a set-up could further the mission. 

Connor's concern and indignation was at once both an unwelcome judgment, and the encapsulation of every fear, every torturous decision she had encountered where her child was concerned since the day the war began. 

To find herself questioned at such a time, when so much of her mission's success--her and Mabel's very lives--depended on the next hours, and on the memorized Nazi radio transmission being placed into the right hands on her return to Berlin, was enough to make the Witchblade pulsate eagerly on her wrist, in anticipation of combat to come. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	38. The World Changes Not So Much

She must have looked as furious, conflicted and saddened by his questions as she felt, or perhaps he saw the Blade sparking on her wrist. Or perhaps he just had enough time to backtrack over the last few days, and the way her presence had turned his world on its ear, breaking down expectations of her even as he built them up. 

"I apologize," Connor said, his head bowing to his chest, where he stood out of the window's direct line of sight. He sighed, with all the exhaustion years of fighting for a cause that seemed lost could bring to a man, and all the fatigue that came from a war that asked too many questions that had no right answers. 

"I forgot myself," he added contritely. "Of course, I am in no position to offer commentary on your life or situation, of which I know so little. It was only--your hurt hurts me, and I canna see clearly how you came to be here, a part of this, when I always thought of you that perfect night, thought of you ever that way; the applauding crowd, the regal theatre. That night," his voice became wistful, nostalgic, "in another country, another universe, when I heard you play." He took his forehead into his hand. "Until New Year's Eve that night was my best memory--of anything since I left home," he confessed. "You don't know how many tight spaces, nights without sleep--and even interrogations that it brought me through." 

"I'm sorry I don't remember it," she said, the frustration of moments ago melting away. Embarrassed at his candidness, she fiddled with the Witchblade on her wrist. 

"How could you?" he asked, shrugging. "I was one of a thousand--and hardly memorable, at that," he rushed on, "Won't you play something now," he asked, slowly looking up. Without referencing his imminent departure directly, he added, "It will be dark in another hour or so." 

She thought of how, after darkness fell he would be leaving, disappearing back into the underground, taking wild risks among the resistance--making choices with which she, herself, might disagree, might find hard to understand, to justify. 

Once at the piano, Rolf's piano, she did not play anything fancy or difficult (as though she wished to impress him with her skill and technique), instead she played the slow and dignified Irish ballad, _Foggy Dew_. It was a favorite of Scott's, back at British Intelligence, when he got too pissed on a Friday night to remember that he was a proper Scotsman. After the first few bars Connor wandered over and sat, facing the opposite direction from her and the piano, on the bench. 

Surprising her (he did not have a poor voice, for all that he was a painter), he began to sing along, quietly--little more than a whisper--chanting the lyrics that recounted Easter Sunday 1916 and the rebellion that followed. 

_"'Twas far better to die 'neath an Irish sky,/than at Suvla or Sud el Bar./And from the plains of royal Meath,/Brave men came hurrying through,/While Britannia's Huns with their long-range guns,/Sailed into the foggy dew."_

And she could see it all, as though she had been there, down to the last stray pebble on the road--the wheeze of a dying man the age of a grandfather. All this came to her, though she had been naught but four at the time, happily oblivious to such things, far away from Ireland and its troubles. It was then that she knew that he had seen it, and that the view she now shared via the Witchblade was that of a child's perspective, a child near Mabel's age. She closed her eyes and shivered. Perhaps the world changed not so very much. 

_"And I parted then with valiant men,/whom I never see no more."_

"Oh, I'm sorry," Elizabeth said, her hands having finished the last notes on the keyboard. "Sorry that you had to see that." 

"To see what?" Connor asked quietly, ignorant of her vision. "That was right lovely," he told her, passing over her remark. "The way you play--why, it was almost like being back there in time--back in that concert hall." 

She saw him smile longingly, his face in profile, as she leaned back from her seat to catch his eye. 

"'Course the seats are better, here," he joked, his right hand inching toward her seat. 

"Shall I play another," she asked, swatting his hand away, wanting to please him, to give him a few more moments of happy reprieve. 

"Let's have a dance," he said. 

"What?" she laughed. "You want to dance?" 

"Well, Lass, I'm a very good dancer--" his eyebrow cocked at her in challenge. "'Twould be a pity if you didn't accept my offer." He stood. 

"What will we dance to?" she asked, almost giddy. "The radio only plays polkas and marches, and I can't very well play _and_ dance." 

"Come on," he said, holding out his hand. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	39. Shall We Dance?

_An unfamiliar landscape. A woman seated, opposite her, wearing her face. The woman's armor threw the light and glare of a campfire into her eyes, making it difficult to focus. _

"Can I get him back," she asked, tears nearly cracking her voice. And though the answer was important--desperately so, she could not hear it when it was given, could not even see the woman's lips as they moved to speak it. Within a heartbeat she was returned to herself. She was Elizabeth Bronte, frozen in the act of accepting Connor's hand and offer to dance. 

"Is this about last night?" he asked, believing her hesitation signified reluctance. "Because I know that what happened--" 

"No," she reassured him, stepping into his embrace. "It's not about last night," she took his hand in hers, caressing his thumb and palm as she might the piano's keys. "It's about right now." 

He took off at a waltz's pace and step. He had not been lying--he was a good dancer--and together, to the beat of a melody he hummed deep within his throat, they cut sweeping arcs across the foyer and the sitting room, swirling and looping until the circles they traced grew smaller, as did the distance between them in the already close embrace of the dance. 

"I don't much like that shirt on you," she said when he had stopped humming. She did not add that she could still smell something of Rolf about it. 

"Well, that's easily fixed," he said, his hands joining with hers to unfasten the buttons down its front. 

They still swayed somewhat, the rhythm of the waltz not yet gone from the room. He began to hum again in the back of his throat, deep and rumbling, like a far off thunder. She placed her cheek to his bare chest (willfully ignoring the divot scar), the sound of his voice carrying the tone through his lungs and into her head like an earthquake in an underground cavern. 

"When I was a child," she told him, "I used to be afraid of thunder." They leaned slowly from side to side, as a single leaf waving in a gentle breeze. 

He began, almost drowsily, to waltz again, and her feet followed, though she kept her eyes closed, the pulse of his heart and the bass in his voice all the compass she needed. 

She was not surprised to find they had made their way to the bedroom, not surprised to see him again on Rolf's bed, and even less surprised to feel the tensing urgency in the pit of her own stomach as she unhooked her garters and tossed them to join Rolf's now cast-off shirt in the corner of the room. 

Connor's hands ran down, along her spine, his mouth on its way to the nape of her neck. 

The Witchblade let go of its usual, tailored clamp on her wrist, sliding heavily up her arm, colliding with her elbow, as if clearing its throat to remind her of time, slipping past her in a way she was not attempting to control. 

"Yes," Elizabeth told it harshly, her voice catching in her throat. "Yes," she said aloud a second time, cursing it for not allowing her even this single act to stand, uninvaded, in privacy. _Not yet_, she begged it in her mind, _but soon_. 

Seemingly chastened, the talisman fell silent. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	40. Wakeup Call

Time slid past, smooth and frictionless, free of vision or portent. She was no one but Elizabeth Bronte from Brooklyn, NY--and he, never anyone but Connor O'Barragh of County Meath. 

The long-forgotten union of time and identity intoxicated her, encouraged her to further tangle the sheets. She felt liberated, carefree. She touched, saw, tasted single layer reality; her senses aligned, cohesive. This was, indeed, not last night, not something she might later imagine she had been tricked into by the manipulations of the Blade. This was, indeed, now. 

She rolled on top of Connor, tightening her hold around him, and it was all she could do to remember Mabel--and in deference to the child, not cry out. Instead, she found herself laughing, deeply, throatily, and in utter abandon as she watched him, and the pleasure in his own eyes. 

And at the crucial moment, just as her vision began to go black around the edges from exertion coupled with impending gratification, the happy tension she anticipated shot like a bullet through a gun's bore--sleek, sudden and explosive--away from lower abdomen and into her right arm. 

_Voila_, the gauntlet. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	41. Time Falls

Her right hand, where it had been gripping his left shoulder, was no longer that of a lover's--but that of a warrior's. And the heavy metal of the ancient talisman knew no gentle caress, no playful massage. Connor must have felt the change even before his eyes tracked it; his shoulder caught in an ever-tightening vise. 

Bronte used her left hand to lift her arm free, then rolled off of Connor and onto her back beside him, their climax routed by the Blade. 

"I'm leaving for Berlin tomorrow," she said, a moment passing as she could not face him but instead looked to the ceiling. With her gauntleted arm, the Witchblade still flashing like a threatened guard dog, she threw aside the satin sheets and stood to cross the room and re-dress. 

"Wait," he grabbed at her as she passed his side of the bed. His hand caught onto the still-armed Witchblade, and the colors in the room swam before her eyes for a moment before they blew away entirely, like early-morning mist off a river. 

Time began to slither and skid, like mercury from a broken thermometer. And like Alice down a rabbit hole, she slid and sunk, the weight of his grip on the Blade her only connection to a room in Paris during the second World War. And the vision took her. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	42. Loopy Soo's circa 1985

A grey day--an afternoon, even. The too-narrow-for-a-car alley between the back of busy shops. A metal door with a sign hung; "Loopy Soo's Cycle Crib." Graffiti--offensive and undecipherable scattered along the facing wall. 

Bronte found she was leaning, standing on one foot, the other flat against the building's side. "I don't know what I'm gonna do," a voice next to her said. 

A young girl--maybe fourteen, tops, blonde--in unfamiliar clothes, shocking in their revealing nature, the tightness with which they hugged her still-developing curves. 

But the accent she knew. New York. The girl's speech was soaked in it. 

"Here," the blonde said, and Bronte felt her hand (but not her hand) go out to accept an already-lit smoke they seemed to be sharing. 

As she took a drag, the heavy metal door swung open and a woman dressed in a skin-tight turquoise sleeveless top decorated in beaded fringe stepped into the alley. 

"Holy Mahalia!" the woman exclaimed, throwing her waist-length braid of jet-black hair over her shoulder. Her face turned hard. "How many times I gotta tell you two no smokin' in my alley--" 

Bronte felt herself, and the blonde, freeze. 

"--'less you bring some along for me?" The woman's faced relaxed into a wide smile as the blonde offered up an unlit cigarette, which the woman quickly lit. 

"Maria, girl," the woman said to the blonde. "Seriously, you gotta do somethin' 'bout that cha-cha hair. You gonna set it on fire someday when you go to light up. Then where you gonna be, ah?" 

Laughter. 

The woman turned to Bronte. "What is this long face for, Sara? It's Friday, right? I didn't mis-count my days of the week again, did I?" 

"No, Lupe," she answered the woman, feeling her face pull into a smile in spite of herself. "Only, Maria's gonna get grounded as soon as she goes home--and where's the fun in that weekend?" 

"Lemme see," the woman, Lupe, asked, beckoning to them. 

Maria, the blonde, produced a paper from her back pocket and handed it to the woman, who took out a rag from her own back pocket and scrubbed at her engine-greased hands with it for a moment before accepting the paper. 

"'D'," she said, turning to the second page, shaking her head. "And your folks know about the paper?" 

"Totally," said Maria, ashing the cigarette on the pavement. "And it's the last straw. They know I'm coming home with it tonight." Maria looked at Bronte, passing her the cigarette, "I'm just gonna have to sneak out." She shrugged. 

The metal door creaked open a second time, and a goateed Asian man, about Lupe's age, set one foot into the alley, straddling the doorway. He held a rag, identical to Lupe's, and a piece of exhaust pipe in his hands. His shirt was emblazoned with the silhouette of a voluptuous woman, sitting, in profile. 

"Loop," he said, his eyes going to each of the girls in silent recognition, "I got some guy at the counter saying he made a deal with you on that Fat Boy with the dented tank--won't talk to anyone else." A frown line settled between his brows, though it was not unfriendly. 

"One minute, Bae," Lupe said, a bit sharply. 

"He's only gonna talk to you--" he, Bae, replied, his jaw cocking slightly at her tone. 

"Ai!" Lupe exclaimed, putting out her cigarette under her heavy boot. 

"Didn't I just hear you say that?" 

The man's face relaxed some when she lost the cigarette. 

"Tell him I'm getting cleaned up," she said, and he stepped back inside, letting the door close. 

Lupe turned her attention back to the girls, and handed Maria back her paper. "Never get involved with a Korean man, you hear me?" she told them in a warning tone. "Promise me now. Because they gonna make your days all work and your nights all heaven and you ain't never gonna leave them. Okay?" 

The girls snickered. 

Lupe pulled out her rag, and again rubbed at her hands. "Sara," she asked, "you got a paper, too?" 

Bronte handed her several sheets of blue-lined paper, stapled in the top-right corner. 

"'C+,'" Lupe announced, from the bright red grease pencil grade on the paper. "Not so good, not so bad. How're you with Mrs. Siri, ah, Marie--She gonna make Joe put the fear of God into you for this, ah? She upset right now?" 

"Not too bad, I guess," Bronte heard herself (but not herself) say. "Why?" 

"'Cause here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna erase your name from this paper, here, and put it on Maria's, and she's gonna put your name on hers. And then you two are gonna go out tonight, and the next night, and you gonna thank God for Lupe Soo every night in your prayers for saving your skin yet again, okay?" 

Lupe paused to re-stuff her grease rag into her back pocket, and do a quick smooth of her hair. "Now get home," she told them, "I gotta go sell another Harley, so when I get home tonight Bae'll still put out." She winked at the girls and disappeared back into the shop through the metal door. 

"Lemme see," Maria said, tugging at the school paper still in Bronte's hands. Before she surrendered it, Bronte got a second's glance at the first few sentences: "In World War Two, the end of Germany being in control of France began when the United States of America and some other countries that were our friends had the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944. This invasion was called D-Day and was very important because--" 

Time hiccoughed. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	43. The Papers, the Money

The vision shivered and ended. "I'm leaving for Berlin tomorrow," she said to Connor, a moment passing as she could not face him in the bed, but instead looked to the ceiling. With her gauntleted arm, the Witchblade still flashing like a threatened guard dog, she threw aside the satin sheets and stood to cross the room and re-dress. 

"Wait," Connor grabbed for her as she passed his side of the bed. His hand tried to catch onto the still-armed Witchblade, but she swung a little to the side--out of the reach of his touch before the colors in the room could swim and turn to mist. 

"I'm leaving for Berlin," she restated her intent, the deja vu of the moment before standing up the hairs on the back of her neck. 

"No," he cajoled. "You're free now," he said, rolling up onto his elbow, the sheet falling away to show her his bare chest and belly. "Come, fight with us," the pride in his voice was unmistakable. "Paris could be ours inside of two months. You'll be the greatest warrior since St. Joan herself." 

"You may recall," she told him as she dressed, "That the Maid of Orleans was burnt at the stake for a witch." She pulled on her stockings. "I have no such plans for my future. What I need is to get back to Berlin. There is a train leaving tomorrow." 

"The one carrying the bodies?" 

But of course he would know the train schedules--and who was coming and going from the city. He'd be a worthless spy if he did not. 

"But I have no money," she explained, fastening the skirt of her dress. "Could you get us a ticket?" she asked, looking up from her work, surprising herself with the question. "Do you know someone who could make us papers?" 

Connor tilted his head to the side, showing the skepticism he felt for her new (to him) plan. "Can't get papers without money. Germans control the train stations--can't get tickets without money _and_ papers." He smiled and shrugged. "Seems you'll have to stay here with me, Joan." Naughtily, he flicked his tongue at her. 

"I cannot stay." For her, her mind full of the Nazi intelligence of the night prior's transmission, it was not a teasing matter. "If you can't help me," she told him bluntly, "I will have to think of another way to get money and papers. Someone else I could ask." It was a lame half-threat. Everyone she knew in Paris was dead. She wondered briefly if the Witchblade would agree to aid and abet a little theft. 

He protested. 

She ordered an extravagant supper, notifying the concierge that she would be checking out tomorrow. 

He tried coaxing. 

She made arrangements for porters and a taxi to come for her and Mabel's trunks and other dunnage. 

He made a moving speech on Free French ideals. 

She woke Mabel, and began packing the child's clothing. 

He reminded her that she had no hope of leaving Paris without money and papers--and no way to get them. 

She went to write a brief note about what should be done with the piano when she left the city. 

He asked to know why. 

"Why?" she echoed his question, knowing she could not tell him--should not tell him--about the Nazi transmission and the valuable information she held within her. "Because I'm not finished yet," she said. 

"Not finished?" he asked, "doing what?" 

"You saw it," she referenced the vision, not sure that he, in fact, had. 

"What?" he asked, and for a moment she couldn't be sure he wasn't being honest, rather than just playing it off. But her eyes held his, and would not look away. The muscle in his jaw tightened and tensed. His right eye began to disappear into a squint. Finally, he broke. "Did that paper even get a good mark?" he asked. "How can you know it's an outcome not to be changed? You cautioned me about having too much faith," he reminded her. 

"In people," she said. "The Witchblade is another matter entirely." 

"Feh," he said. 

By the time supper arrived, and Mabel came out to the table to eat, he saw that it was no use, Bronte's resolve was too entrenched. 

"There's more to this," he intimated, wagging his finger at her, stating the truth so that she didn't have to. 

"If we lived in a different world, I would stay," she offered. 

"If," he said. "_If_ the Jerries had not come to Paris, _if_ my parents had had the money to send me to America instead of just across the Channel, _if_ you had not come to Paris with your Lieutenant, _if_ you had not gone to a party, _if_ time could turn back in on itself. _If_." He sighed and shook his head as though to clear it. "I will find you the money. And the papers." 

And he left. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	44. Au revoir

Bronte received a package early that next morning, the fifth of January, 1942. She was told by the bellman that it had been delivered by a priest. Inside was enough money to pay the hotel bill and settle with the taxi once they were taken to the station. After its arrival she had just enough time to finish her last stitches on the black mourning armbands she had made hastily for herself and Mabel from an older skirt she had had with her. 

She tucked her sewing kit back into her trunk, next to Rolf's uniform. She had not known what to do with the SS outfit, certainly had not felt she could leave it behind. Perhaps, in future, it could be of some use to her. 

The bellman rang again a moment after she closed the trunk, coming to belt the straps, and to let her know that her taxi had arrived. As she walked into the building's lobby and passed the concierge's desk, she saw him turn to her, giving an abbreviated bow and happily chirping, "_Au revoir_, Madame Germer,"--even throwing a cheery wave to Mabel. 

Bronte returned his bow with a short nod of her head. He could afford to be agreeable; upon paying for Rolf's piano, she had willed it to the hotel upon her departure. Mere moments after she and Mabel had begun their way down the staircase to the lobby they witnessed workmen coming up, in their hands straps and blankets and a board to carry the instrument somewhere more public where it could be shown off. 

In light of such good fortune, the concierge could afford to be generous, all his fears and trouble over their outstanding bill now evaporated, forgotten. She, on the other hand, could afford nothing. And had no idea what she might meet with at the station. She gripped Mabel's gloved hand in her own, her gaze high and proud. She believed in the Witchblade, for all that it had lain silent since gifting her that last, hopeful vision of the future. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	45. Ad Hoc Porters

The station was nearly abandoned; travelers more likely to journey south, toward Vichy, and possible escape from their new overlords. Berlin departures were nothing of interest to most Parisians. 

From a distance she saw them--Connor and the priest--just as she stepped from the taxi and helped Mabel down. She suppressed the urge to smile, and was pleased when Mabel did not shout at her new friend, or take off to join him. The taxi driver, visibly skittish of Nazis, and most-dismayed that he had accepted a fare to the station where so many military could be found, bore their trunks only as far as the platform, then disappeared. 

Slowly, almost lackadaisically, Connor and the priest, who had been standing nonchalant near the ticket window, walked over, as though nothing more than two men hoping to earn a few francs loading her heavy trunks. 

She did not say hello when they were close enough to hear her, did not act as though she knew them prior, but found she had to work much harder than she would have thought to hold in the urge to ask if it were safe for them to be seen together. 

Connor's eyes searched her own, as if in the hopes of finding that she had changed her mind. Though she did not mean them to, she imagined hers seemed harsh to him: clear cut decision and commitment shining from them. 

"_Guten tag_," said Mabel to the two men, the first of the group to speak, as though she had met them at the park, casually in-between turns on the merry-go-round. The priest smiled at her, and extended his hand for the shaking. 

As porters were in short supply, and the job of toting chests and steamer trunks was not to the taste of the Germans staffing the train station, Connor took their luggage to load himself. She and Mabel were left alone with the priest, who handed her a second envelope, this time of German marks--the best paper money to have in Paris; as currency, second only to gold. And no easy thing to acquire. 

Bronte accepted the envelope without asking how Connor had come by it, but the priest told her anyway. 

"He sold a little painting," the Father offered, "about so high, and so wide." He framed the painting's small 9x14 size with his hands. "A rare oil, from about 1412, or so." 

She did not ask him to go on, but again, he did. 

"He cut it out of the frame right before the armistice. Never saw him go anywhere without it. Carried it about like a Russky might an icon." 

Connor returned and presented her with papers before the priest could tell her any more. 

Opening the documents in her hands, she was stunned to see that they were not just any papers--not new forgeries or doctored originals, but, indeed, the self same papers she had lost the night of the explosion. 

"Seems Bellamy, here," Connor referenced the other man by name, "was offered these in an under-the-table deal. He makes a little on the side, don't you know, handling the German's 'paperwork,'" he made a joke of the priest's black market pastime. "Came to us straight from Rome--knows the Holy Father himself," Connor rested his hand on the other man's back, in approval. "Thought, under the circumstances, we might as well give them back to you, and the pretty one known as Mabel." He smiled down fondly at the child, standing well behaved, at her mother's side. 

"So they were found?" Bronte asked, her throat threatening to close in worry over what this new wrinkle could possibly mean. 

"Not by anyone of concern--," Connor assured her, his cavalier attitude going a long way to allay her nerves. "Just some graverobber-types who got to the rubble before the authorities. They're back safe in your hands, now. Barely any worse for wear." 

He moved his hand to her upper arm, as though to comfort her, but caught himself in time. It would not do for them to appear familiar in such a public place. The fact she was wearing all black seemed suddenly to hit him as he noticed Mabel's armband as well. He winced. 

"They'll be coming soon with the bodies," she warned him, scanning the platform for any onlookers. "Goodbye." Her words were rushed, the nod of thanks that accompanied them deliberately detached and brief. 

"Oh, no," Connor refused. "Not that way," he told her. "We'll be having us a proper send-off." 

Her eyes roamed the horizon. It was true, for the moment they were alone, only the Father and Mabel, and a porter so distant as to be nearly out of sight. 

"This is for you," she half-mumbled, almost having decided not to give it to him. She extended a scarf she had sewn for him the night before, from the grey silk of her ruined New Year's gown. 

He took it with a look of curiosity, and slung it around his neck. "Tie it on me," he said, presenting the two ends to her to knot and tuck warmly about his neck. 

"From now on," he told her as she leaned in to fasten the scarf, his spitefulness stepping in the way to help him hold in the pain of the parting, "they'll none of them be me." The corner of his mouth shot up in a conflicted smile. He did not have to reference to whom the 'they' referred. 

Finishing with the scarf, she took his face in her hands, cursing the fact they were gloved against the cold. She wanted to be able to feel the reassuring warmth of him. "And from now on, Brother Fenian," she realized she had begun to cry. "They'll all of them be me." 

Some twisted place inside her encouraged the emotion. It would be good to be in outright mourning when they brought Rolf's body to be loaded, good to have some other emotion on tap besides the complicated passions she had been wrestling with since his death. 

As she wept, they kissed; the act, in a bare instance, over. 

_A table in low light, flanked by lamps. A hand slid a leather bound book into line among several others. The hand bearing the same mark as did her left hip. "Everything," a voice said._

Bronte pulled apart from Connor, her eyes half closed by tears and unable to focus, and walked away to the ticket window--not looking back--to purchase her and Mabel's fare to Berlin. She felt bone-cold, more deeply than the chilly day could have inspired. 

As she was handed the tickets, she heard the rumble of heavy carts on the platform behind her, and Mabel tugged at her skirt: the bodies had arrived. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	46. Surprise!

Moments later, as she stood watching the wooden coffins being loaded into the cars that would carry them back to Berlin, she heard a familiar voice call out her name. 

It was Major Stretzer. 

"My dear Frau Bronte!" he shouted to her over the noise, from where he sat, confined to a wheelchair. "How very delightful it is to see you!" 

She could hardly acclimate herself to the idea that the Stretzer was alive. 

"But, how?" was all she could ask him, and with the puffy face she had from her recent tears (which he imputed to her grief over Rolf), he, very jolly, glossed over her lack of pleasantries, or concern for his condition. 

"Most remarkable," he claimed as they boarded the train, and he asked her to join him in his private car for the duration of the journey. Two solid enlisted men lifted his wheelchair--with him still in it--up the cast-iron steps. 

"Miraculously, I was taking a leak at the time. And though, as you can see, I am somewhat worse for the wear with some bad ribs and a broken leg--I have survived to tell the tale! Ah," he sighed. "Paris was not kind to us on this visit, I think. But," he counseled, "she will learn to be a better hostess in the future." 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	47. An Excellent Acquisition

Once they were installed comfortably in his car, and before the train pulled away from the station, he announced, "what luck, what luck today--not only to find you, good Frau, but also, I have made an excellent acquisition for der Fuhrer." He reached below his lap blanket and produced a tightly rolled tube, which she at first took to be parchment. 

As he unwrapped it, she realized it was, rather, a canvas. A small, unframed 9x14 canvas. A chill when down her spine. 

There, depicted on the ancient canvas was the Witchblade, armed into the full gauntlet, the eyes of its wearer sparking with the light of the talisman stone. 

"Look!" Major Stretzer encouraged. "I have seen this very weapon in der Fuehrer's own collection! It must be--what, do you think? _Thousands_ of years old." 

Though he could not hope to reconcile the ancient weapon shown in the painting with the jeweled bauble on her wrist, Elizabeth's hand moved instinctively to the Witchblade, covered entirely by both her coat sleeve and glove. 

"Yes," he proclaimed, "I think I have made a good day of it. A very good day. But you must be tired, Frau," he added. "Do take a seat. We will depart soon, I think." 

Bronte stepped to the window facing the ticket kiosk, knowing soon she would have to seek out a washroom and set about righting her face with some cold water. After all, weeping and marring one's face with tears, sniffling with a snotty nose and puffy eyes did not an SS officer catch. And to finish what she had started, to rejoin the intricate spy game as a major player, she required such an officer. 

And, from what she could tell, Major Stretzer required something of a nurse--at least for the time present. Once his leg healed she was certain there were--other ways--she could prove invaluable to him, and he to her. 

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	48. A New Secret

Barely beyond the door to the private sitting room she had left, she leaned against the paneled wall, her forehead to the wood as though it were cool metal or glass--something able to relieve the tension in her mind. 

_"The Witchblade," she heard, the portent no more than auditory, "it draws to your life only what it needs to teach you to achieve its ends."_

How many times would she be forced to again learn the same lesson? The exploded theatre would have claimed her, had it not been for the prickings of the Witchblade. Little use she (or the Blade) would be to anyone buried in rubble. Had Connor not kidnapped her she would doubtless have been discovered near the blast by those Nazis responding to the alarm. Had she not been penniless and without papers she would likely have left for Berlin the next morning instead of sitting out the better part of a week in her suite, waiting. Had she left she would have not met up with Stretzer, and all the opportunities he presented. 

Had Connor not followed her back to her hotel, not spent the night with her--would the Blade have gifted her with the valuable Nazi radio broadcast that she carried within her now? If she had not stuck by her guns to return to Berlin (against her own body's desires, and Connor's), would she have received the future vision, that prophetic poorly marked school paper, upon which she could now hang so many of her hopes? 

Indeed, the Witchblade had its own agenda, and even now happily confirmed a suspicion that she had been carrying about since early that morning. The Blade had desired more of Connor than simply his ability to get her out of several tight situations, and with his influence and connection give her the means to depart Paris. The usual amount of time had passed, those five years ago, before she was able to confirm to Jack that they would be expecting Mabel. But, able to twist time on a spit, or blow it onto the air like dandelion seeds, the Witchblade had no such need of such conventions. Life divided and multiplied within her even as she stood in this train's hallway, building and developing within her womb. 

She would be mother to Connor O'Barragh's child. Why the Witchblade wanted this, she did not know. How a child born of a worn-wielder might grow or be, she could not say. The fact that she was now expecting did give her a tighter time frame for what she must accomplish. 

The child would be thought Rolf's. This, at least, would give her a certain status where his better friends were concerned. Stretzer, for example, could be told she had not attended the New Year's party: they had not crossed paths that night, as he had arrived late. She would tell him that she and Rolf had quarreled over the pregnancy. She had demanded he leave his wife. Doubtless, Stretzer would find such a demand enchantingly foolish, as Rolf would have. 

She would have her work cut out for her, though, making herself indispensable to the Major long before she was due. Something about that thought turned her stomach. A child within her, only hours old, and already she and the Blade were working to exploit it to their ends. 

But they were good ends, she reminded herself, and ends to which her own life--and Mabel's, even, were already committed. 

She could never tell Scott, she thought; never let her British contact know until she could conceal it no longer. She could not afford to be removed from the game board prematurely. 

And, of course, she could never tell Connor. Did not even have the information necessary to contact him. Something in her heart told her the knowledge of such a thing could drive him mad; cause him to stumble in his own work, here. 

Instead, the child would remain, as so much of her life was, its own secret.

. 

_...to be continued..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	49. There is time enough

On her way to the washroom down the short hall, the train lurched into motion under her feet, jerkily chug-chug-chugging away from the station. 

For so many times since the turning of the year she had told herself that she had no living friends in Paris, no connections. That her life had died, crushed under the debris of an exploded theatre. Yet the Witchblade had proved her wrong. In exchange for those compatriots she had found another, truer connection. In exchange for the life with Rolf, a new one lay before, and within, her. For everything that had seemed denied her--that had seemed impossible--had been so only from a certain perspective. In placing her faith in the talisman (though she had faltered many times), she had again been taught: there was time enough, and reason. 

Elizabeth Bronte stood in the passageway and watched the station begin to slip by, like time shuttling past. She could have been wrong, but at the end of the platform she felt sure she saw a man called Jean, standing alone, no hand raised in farewell--instead, his hands cupped over his mouth, attempting to light a cigarette. She hoped it was a good, wholesome American one. 

_The talisman on her wrist boiled, its colors bubbling like oil among vinegar. It was a warm summer evening, the orchestra was tuning up, the large floor of the stage lay two balconies below her. The man next to her shifted in his seat, pulling at his necktie in the rising heat. _

In a blink, she was walking on stage, the familiar hardwood beneath the soft soles of her shoes. The wood of the grand piano's lid shone like glass, and as she played she came to a moment; a single instance when she held a quarter note for a full half, and turned her head, inclining it to the third balcony, where a man sat, hat gripped in his hands, a smile like that he wore in sweet, unguarded sleep on his face. Time held its place, as though she had noted a fermata for the conductor, and at the next beat of her heart--a strong thump in her chest--she resumed the piece. 

The sight of his retreating form through the train's window, with Paris sinking into the horizon behind her, felt like leaving home all over again. 

. 

_...continue to the epilogue..._

. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


	50. Epilogue

**New York City, 2001** - Sara Pezzini rolled over in bed, jolted awake. The basement bloc glass window above her head suffused the room with dim, bluish light. Tangled in sheet, she sat up. She really needed a smoke. 

Which made no sense. She'd kicked that habit years ago. Her anxious fingers twitched and tugged at her black tank and boy shorts, itching for a cigarette. _Weird._

She looked down at the Witchblade, as if asking it, "wanna tell me what's up?" The amulet stone's markings swam about under her scrutiny, but offered up no clues. She rubbed at one eye like a child first waking. Taking her hand away, she was surprised to feel that her cheeks were wet--as though she had been crying in her sleep. _Again, weird. What did she have to bawl about?_

She lay back down, falling heavily onto the mattress. Something seemed to be tugging at the corner of her mind, though she could not name it. Something caught her eye on her bedside table: the phone number of the man at the bar near Spartacus Ring--what had his name been? _Conchobar._

She didn't stop to check the time. (Almost instinctively she did it with so little fore-thought.) She keyed the number into her black cordless and listened to the phone ring. 

"Hello?" said a voice on the other end, picking up the connection. "Hello?" 

Sara Pezzini keyed off the phone, thankful that she had both an unlisted number and call block and could not be star sixty-nined. _What was wrong with her lately? Acting like some teenaged girl, calling a guy in the wee smalls and hanging up. Really, this sort of thing had to stop._

She lay back down and began reviewing the latest information on her current case in her head. After all, if she couldn't sleep, the least she could do was get some quality think-time in per the job. 

By tomorrow, she might even have something she could use to show up Danny. She laughed to herself, the dreams and the abandoned phone call all but forgotten. 

It was three a.m., and though she did not know it, she had less than forty-eight hours in which to save John Patrick Dougherty--the man known as Conchobar--'s life. 

...The End...

* * *

_occupation (n.)_- 1.) An activity that serves as one's regular source of livelihood. A vocation, employment or job. 2.) The state of being held or possessed. See also, _pre-occupied_. 3.) The invasion, conquest, and control of a nation by foreign armed forces. 

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Witchblade_, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;) 

* * *

Many, many thanks to those of you who have left me such generous feedback along the way. And for those of you who have read but have not checked in--I hope you liked the journey as well. 

by: Neftzer (c)2003  
_Feedback Appreciated!_  
Check out royaltoby.com / shack for Neftzer's OutBack Fiction Shack 


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